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CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 
E. F. BENSON 



BY E. F. BENSON 



THE FREAKS OF MAYFAIR 

THE TORTOISE 

MICHAEL 

THE OAKLEYITES 

DAVID BLAIZE 

ARUNDEL 

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



CRESCENT AND 
IRON CROSS 



BY 

E. F. BENSON 




NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



" / ' 



COPYRIGHT, 1918, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



W ^ i9!3 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



WCU494568 



PREFACE 

In compiling the following pages I have had 
access to certain sources of official information, 
the nature of which I am not at liberty to spec- 
ify further. I have used these freely in such 
chapters of this book as deal with recent and 
contemporary events in Turkey or in Germany 
in connection with Turkey: the chapter, for in- 
stance, entitled "Deutschland iiber Allah,' 9 is 
based very largely on such documents. I have 
tried to be discriminating in their use, and have 
not, as far as I am aware, stated anything de- 
rived from them as a fact, for which I had not 
found corroborative evidence. With regard to 
the Armenian massacres I have drawn largely 
on the testimony collected by Lord Bryce, on 
that brought forward by Mr. Arnold J. Toyn- 
bee in his pamphlet The Murder of a Nation, 
and The Murderous Tyranny of the Turks, and 
on the pamphlet by Dr. Martin Niepage, called 
The Horrors of Aleppo. In the first chapter I 
have based the short historical survey on the 
contribution of Mr. D. G. Hogarth to The Bal- 



vi PREFACE 

; — — i 

Jeans (Clarendon Press, 1915). The chapter 
called "Thy Kingdom is Divided' ' is in no re- 
spect at all an official utterance, and merely 
represents the individual opinions and surmises 
of the author. It has, however, the official basis 
that the Allies have pledged themselves to re- 
move the power of the Turk from Constanti- 
nople, and to remove out of the power of the 
Turk the alien peoples who have too long al- 
ready been subject to his murderous rule. I 
have, in fact, but attempted to conjecture in 
what kind of manner that promise will be ful- 
filled. 

Fresh items of news respecting internal con- 
ditions in Turkey are continually coming in, 
and if one waited for them all, one would have 
to wait to the end of the war before beginning 
to write at all on this subject. But since such 
usefulness as this book may possibly have is 
involved with the necessity of its appearance 
before the end of the war, I set a term to the 
gathering of material, and, with the exception 
of two or three notes inserted later, ceased to 
collect it after June 1917. But up to then any- 
thing that should have been inserted in sur- 
veys and arguments, and is not, constitutes a 
culpable omission on my part. 

E. F. BENSON. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Theory of the Old Turks ... 11 

II The Theory of the New Turks ... 39 

III The End of the Armenian Question . 62 

IV The Question of Syria and Palestine . 107 
V Deutschland Uber Allah 139 

VI "Thy Kingdom is Divided" 182 

VII The Grip of the Octopus 226 



vii 



CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 



! 




THE BALKAN STATES * 

showing boundaries settled by 
Treaty of Berlin 

1878 



34 



English Miles 
o ao to no ma lao 



MEDITERRANEAN SEA 



18 



20 



22 



24 



26 



28 



Stnnfbrrib Geaftlstafc, 




^> 



OREAr 




Navarino* 



THE BALKAN STATES 

at the outbreak of 
The European War 

1914 



ASIA 

Smyrna 



•ACCRETE 



?* 



r 



English Miles 



A7 



EDITERRANEAN SEA 



a* 



18 



20 



22 



24. 



26 



28 



Stun/brtf&Geool&tadtZontlon. 






CRESCENT AND IRON 
CROSS 

CHAPTER I 

The Theory of the Old Turks 

The maker of- phrases plies a dangerous trade. 
Very often his phrase is applicable for the mo- 
ment and for the situation in view of which he 
coined it, but his coin has only a temporary 
validity: it is good for a month or for a year, 
or for whatever period during which the crisis 
lasts, and after that it lapses again into a mere 
token, a thing without value and without mean- 
ing. But the phrase cannot, as in the case of 
a monetary coinage, at once be recalled, for it 
has gone broadcast over the land, or, at any 
rate, it is not recalled, and it goes on being 
passed from hand to hand, its image and super- 
scription defaced by wear, long after it has 
ceased to represent anything. In itself it is 
obsolete, but people still trade with it, and think 

11 



12 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

it represents what it represented when it came 
hot from the Mint. And, unfortunately, it 
sometimes happens that it is worse than value- 
less; it becomes a forgery (which it may not 
have been when it came into circulation), and 
deceives those who traffic with it, flattering 
them with an unfounded possession. 

Such a phrase, which still holds currency, 
was once coined by Lord Aberdeen in the pe- 
riod of the Crimean War. "Turkey is a sick 
man," he said, and added something which 
gave great offence then about the advisability 
of putting Turkey out of his misery. I do not 
pretend to quote correctly, but that was the gist 
of it. Nor do I challenge the truth of Lord 
Aberdeen's phrase at the period when he made 
it. It possibly contained a temporary truth, a 
valid point of view, which, if it had been acted 
on, might have saved a great deal of trouble 
afterwards, but it missed then, and more than 
misses now, the essential and salient truth 
about Turkey. The phrase, unfortunately, still 
continued to obtain credit, and nowadays it is 
a forgery; it rings false. 

For at whatever period we regard Turkey, 
and try to define that monstrous phenomenon, 
we can make a far truer phrase than Lord Aber- 
deen's. For Turkey is not a sick man: Tur- 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 13 



key is a sickness. He is not sick, nor ever has 
been, for lie is the cancer itself, the devouring 
tumour that for centuries has fed on living tis- 
sue, absorbing it and killing it. It has never 
had life in itself, except in so far that the 
power of preying on and destroying life con- 
stitutes life, and such a power, after all, we 
are accustomed to call not life, but death. 
Turkey, like death, continues to exist and to 
dominate, through its function of killing. Life 
cannot kill, it is disease and death that kill, and 
from the moment that Turkey passed from 
being a nomadic tribe moving westwards from 
the confines of Persia, it has existed only 
and thrived on a process of absorption and of 
murder. When first the Turks came out of 
their Eastern fastnesses they absorbed; when 
they grew more or less settled, and by degrees 
the power of mere absorption, as by some fail- 
ure of digestion, left them, they killed. They 
became a huge tumour, that nourished itself by 
killing the living tissues that came in contact 
with it. Now, by the amazing irony of fate, 
who weaves stranger dramas than could ever 
be set on censored stages, for they both take 
hundreds of years to unravel themselves, and 
are of the most unedifying character, Turkey, 
the rodent cancer, has been infected by another 



14 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

with greater organisation for devouring; the 
disease of Ottomanism is threatened by a more 
deadly hnngerer, and Prussianism has inserted 
its crab-pincers into the cancer that came out 
of Asia. Those claws are already deeply set, 
and the problem for civilised nations is first 
to disentangle the nippers that are cancer in a 
cancer, and next to deprive of all power over 
alien peoples the domination that has already 
been allowed to exist too long. 

The object of this book is the statement of 
the case on which all defenders of liberty base 
their prosecution against Turkey itself, and 
against the Power that to-day has Turkey in 
its grip. 

Historical surveys are apt to be tedious, but 
in order to understand at all adequately the 
case against Turkey as a ruler and controller 
of subject peoples, it is necessary to go, though 
briefly, into her blood-stained genealogy. There 
is no need to enter into ethnological discussions 
as to earlier history, or define the difference 
between the Osmanli Turks and those who were 
spread over Asia Minor before the advent of 
the Osmanlis from the East. But it was the 
Osmanlis who were the cancerous and devour- 
ing nation, and it is they who to-day rule over a 
vast territory (subject to Germany) of peoples 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 15 

alien to them by religion and blood and all the 
instincts common to civilised folk. Until Ger- 
many, "deep patient Germany," suddenly 
hoisted her colours as a champion of murder 
and rapine and barbarism, she the mother of 
art and literature and science, there was noth- 
ing in Europe that could compare with the an- 
achronism of Turkey being there at all. Then, 
in August 1914, there was hoisted the German 
flag, superimposed with skulls and cross-bones, 
and all the insignia of piracy and highway rob- 
bery on land and on sea, and Germany showed 
herself an anachronism worthy to impale her 
arms on the shield of the most execrable dom- 
ination that has ever oppressed the world since 
the time when the Huns under Attila raged like 
a forest fire across the cultivated fields of Euro- 
pean civilisation. To-day, in the name of Kul- 
tur, a similar invasion has broken on shores 
that seemed secure, and it is no wonder that it 
has found its most valuable victim and ally in 
the Power that adopted the same methods of 
absorption and extermination centuries before 
the Hohenzollerns ever started on their career 
of highway robbery. But like seeks like, and 
perhaps it was not wholly the fault of our aston- 
ishing diplomacy in Constantinople that Tur- 
key, wooed like some desirable maiden, cast in 



16 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

f 3 

her lot with the Power that by instinct and tra- 
dition most resembled her. Spiritual blood, no 
less than physical blood, is thicker than water, 
and Gott and Allah, hand-in-hand, pledged each 
other in the cnps they had filled with the blood 
that poured from the wine-presses of Belgium 
and of Armenia. 

For centuries before the Osmanli Turks made 
their appearance in Asia Minor, there had come 
from out of the misty East numerous bodies of 
Turks, pushing westwards, and spreading over 
the Euphrates valley and over Persia, in noma- 
dic or military colonisations, and it is not until 
the thirteenth century that we find the Osmanli 
Turks, who give their name to that congrega- 
tion of races known as the Ottoman Empire, 
established in the north-west corner of Asia 
Minor. Like all previous Turkish immigrations, 
they came not in any overwhelming horde, with 
sword in one hand and Koran in the other, but 
as a small compact body with a genius for mili- 
tary organisation, and the gift, which they re- 
tain to this day, of stalwart fighting. The pol- 
icy to which they owed their growth was absorp- 
tion, and the people whom they first began to 
absorb were Greeks and other Christians, and 
it was to a Christian girl, Nilufer, that Osman 
married his son Orkhan. They took Christian 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 17 

youths from the families of Greek dwellers, 
forced them to apostatise, gave them military 
training, and married them to Turkish girls. It 
was out of this blend of Greek and Turkish 
blood, as Mr. D. G. Hogarth points out, that 
they derived their national being and their na- 
tional strength. This system of recruiting they 
steadily pursued not only among the Christian 
peoples with whom they came in contact, but 
among the settlements of Turks who had pre- 
ceded them in this process of pushing west- 
wards, and formed out of them the professional 
soldiery known as Janissaries. They did not 
fight for themselves alone, but as mercenaries 
lent their arms to other peoples, Moslem and 
Christian alike, who would hire their services. 
This was a policy that paid well, for, after hav- 
ing delivered some settlement from the depreda- 
tions of an inconvenient neighbour, and with 
their pay in their pocket, they sometimes turned 
on those who had hired their arms, took their 
toll of youths, and finally incorporated them in 
their growing empire. Like an insatiable 
sponge, they mopped up the sprinklings of dis- 
connected peoples over the fruitful floor of Asia 
Minor, and swelled and prospered. But as yet 
the extermination of these was not part of their 
programme: they absorbed the strength and 



18 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

manhood of their annexations into their own 
soldiery, and came back for more. They did 
not levy those taxes paid in the persons of sol- 
diers for their armies from their co-religionists, 
since Islam may not fight against Islam, but by 
means of peaceful penetration (a policy long 
since abandoned) they united scattered settle- 
ments of Turks to themselves by marriages and 
the bond of a common tongue and religion. 

Their expansion into Europe began in the 
middle of the fourteenth century, when, as mer- 
cenaries, they fought against the Serbs, and 
fifty years later they had a firm hold over Bul- 
garia as well. Greece was their next prey ; they 
penetrated Bosnia and Macedonia, and in 1453 
attacked and took Constantinople under Mo- 
hammed the Conqueror. Still true to the policy 
of incorporation they continued to mop up the 
remainder of the Balkan Peninsula, and at the 
same time consolidated themselves further in 
Asia Minor. By the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century their expansion reached its ut- 
most geographical limits, but already the Em- 
pire held within it the seeds of its own decay, 
and by a curious irony the force that should still 
keep it together was derived not from its own 
strength, but from the jealousies of the Euro- 
pean Powers among themselves, who would will- 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 19 

ingly have dismembered it, but feared the quar- 
rels that would surely result from the appor- 
tionment of its territories. The Ottoman Em- 
pire from then onwards has owed its existence 
to its enemies. 

Its weakness lay in itself, for it was very 
loosely knit together, and no bond, whether of 
blood or religion or tongue, bound to it the 
assembly of Christian and Jewish and non- 
Moslem races of which it was so largely com- 
posed. The Empire never grew (as, for in- 
stance, the British Empire grew) by the emigra- 
tion and settlement of the Osmanli stock in the 
territories it absorbed: it never gave, it only 
took. From the beginning right up to the last 
quarter of the nineteenth century, it has been a 
military despotism, imposing itself on unwill- 
ing and alien tribes whom it drained of their 
blood, and then left in neglect until some fur- 
ther levy was needed. None of its conquered 
peoples was ever given a share in the govern- 
ment; they were left unorganised and, so to 
speak, undigested elements under the Power 
which had forced them into subjection, and one 
by one the whole of the European peoples in- 
cluded in that uncemented tyranny have passed 
from under Turkish control. Turkey in Europe 
has dwindled to a strip along the Bosporus to 



20 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles, Egypt 
has been lost, Tripoli also, and the only force 
that, for the last hundred years has kept alive 
in Europe the existence of that monstrous an- 
achronism has been the strange political phe- 
nomenon, now happily extinct, called the Bal- 
ance of Power. No one of the Great Powers, 
from fear of the complications that would ensue, 
could risk the expulsion of the Turkish Govern- 
ment from Constantinople, and there all through 
the nineteenth century it has been maintained 
lest the Key of the Black Sea, which unlocked 
the bolts that barred Russia's development into 
the Mediterranean, should lead to such a war 
as we are now passing through. That policy, 
for the present, has utterly defeated its own 
ends, for the key is in the pockets of Prussia. 
But all through that century, though the Powers 
maintained Turkey there, they helped to liber- 
ate, or saw liberate themselves, the various 
Christian kingdoms in Europe over which at the 
beginning of the eighteenth century Turkey ex- 
ercised a military despotism. They weakened 
her in so far as they could, but they one and all 
refused to let her die, and above all refused to 
give her that stab in the heart which would 
have been implied in her expulsion from Con- 
stantinople. 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 21 

For centuries from the first appearance of the 
Osmanlis in north-west Asia Minor down to the 
reign of Abdul Hamid, the Empire maintained 
itself, with alternate bouts of vigour and re- 
lapses, on the general principle of drawing its 
strength from its subject peoples. Internally, 
from whatever standpoint we view it, whether 
educational, economic, or industrial, it has had 
the worst record of any domination known to 
history. Rich in mineral wealth, possessed of 
lands that were once the granary of the world, 
watered by amazing rivers, and with its strat- 
egic position on the Mediterranean that holds 
the master-key of the Black Sea in its hands, it 
has remained the most barbaric and least pro- 
gressive of all states. Its roads and means of 
communication remained up till the last quarter 
of the nineteenth century much as they had been 
in the days of Osman; except along an insig- 
nificant strip of sea-coast railways were non- 
existent; it was bankrupt in finance and in 
morals, and did not contain a single seed that 
might ripen into progress or civilisation. Mes- 
opotamia was once the most fertile of all lands, 
capable of supporting not itself alone, but half 
the civilised world : nowadays, under the stew- 
ardship of the Turk, it has been suffered to be- 
come a desert for the greater part of the year 



22 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

and an impracticable swamp for the remainder. 
"Where great cities flourished, where once was 
reared the pride of Babylon and of Nineveh, 
there huddle the squalid huts of fever-stricken 
peasants, scarce able to gain their half-starved 
living from the soil that once supported in lux- 
ury and pomp the grandeur of metropolitan 
cities. The ancient barrages, the canals, the 
systems of irrigation were all allowed to silt up 
and become useless ; and at the end of the nine- 
teenth century you would not find in all Mesopo- 
tamia an agricultural implement that was in any 
way superior to the ploughs and the flails of 
more than two thousand years ago. But so long 
as there was a palace-guard about the gates to 
secure the safety of the Sultan and his corrupt 
military oligarchy, so long as there were houris 
to divert their leisure, tribute of youths to swell 
their armies, and taxes wrung from starving 
subjects to maintain their pomp, there was not 
one of those who held the reins of government 
who cared the flick of an eyelash for the needs 
of the nations on whom the Empire rested, for 
the cultivation of its soil that would yield a 
hundred-fold to the skilled husbandman, or for 
the exploitation and development of its internal 
wealth. While there was left in the emaciated 
carcase of the Turkish Empire enough live tis- 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 23 

sue for the cancerous Government to grow fat 
on, it gave not one thought to the welfare of all 
those races on whom it had fastened itself. 
Province after province of its European domin- 
ions might be lost to it, but the Balance of 
Power still kept the Sultan on his throne, and 
left the peoples of Asia Minor and Syria at his 
mercy. They were largely of alien religion and 
of alien tongue, and their individual weakness 
was his strength. Neglect, and the decay conse- 
quent on neglect, was the lot of all who lan- 
guished under that abominable despotism. 

With the accession in 1876 of Abdul Hamid, 
of cursed memory, there dawned on the doomed 
subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire a day of 
bloodier import than any yet. The year before 
and during that year had occurred the Bul- 
garian atrocities and massacres, and the word 
" massacre' ' lingered and made music in Abdul 
Hamid 's brain. He said it over to himself and 
dwelt upon it, and meditated on the nature and 
possibilities of massacre. The troubles which 
massacre had calmed had arisen before his ac- 
cession out of the establishment of the Bul- 
garian Exarchate, which corresponded to the 
Greek Patriarchate, and was given power over 
districts and peoples whom the Greeks justly 
considered to belong to them by blood and re- 



M CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

i K 

ligion. Greek armed bands came into collision 
with Bulgarian bands, and in order to calm 
these disturbances by thoroughly effectual 
means, irregular Turkish troops were sent into 
Bulgaria, charged with the command to "stop 
the row, - ' but with no other instructions. Indis- 
criminate killing, with all the passions and hor- 
rors that bloodshed evokes in the half-civilised, 
followed, and there was no more trouble just 
then in the disturbed districts, for there was 
none to make trouble. In 1876 Abdul Aziz was 
deposed by a group of king-makers under Mid- 
hat Pasha, Murad v. reigned shadow-like for 
three months, and during the same year Abdul 
Hamid was finally selected to fill the throne, and 
stand forth as the Shadow of God. It was a 
disturbed and tottering inheritance to which he 
succeeded, riddled with the dry-rot of corrup- 
tion, but the inheritor proved himself equal to 
the occasion. 

For a little while he was all abroad, and at 
the bidding of Midhat, who had placed him on 
the throne, he summoned a kind of representa- 
tive Turkish Parliament, by way of imbuing the 
Great Powers with the idea that he was an en- 
lightened Shadow of God bent on reform. This 
parody of a Parliament lasted but a short time : 
it was no more than a faint, dissolving magic- 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 25 

, ■! ■! ■ ■■ ■"■ ■■' ■ ■ I I I ■■■!■! ■■ —I W IIIII I I M il ■■I1.11I H 

fc — ■ - — ■ ' — ■ ■ ■ " ■ "™ * 

lantern picture. In the spring of 1877 Rumania, 
under Russian encouragement, broke away from 
Turkish rule. Turkey declared war on Russia, 
and in 1878 found herself utterly defeated. At 
Adrianople was. drawn up the Treaty of San 
Stefano, creating an independent Bulgarian 
state, and, in the opinion of Great Britain and 
Germany, giving Russia far greater influence in 
the Balkan Peninsula than was agreeable to that 
disastrous supporter of Turkey, the Balance of 
Power. In consequence the Treaty of San 
Stefano was superseded by the Treaty of 
Berlin. 

In those arrangements Abdul Hamid had no 
voice, but he was well content to sit quiet, think 
about what was to be done with what was left 
him, and thank his waning crescent that once 
again the Balance of Power had secured Con- 
stantinople for him, leaving him free to deal 
with his Asiatic dominions, and such part of 
Europe as was left him, as he thought fit. He 
could safely trust that he would never be ejected 
from his throne by a foreign Power, and all he 
need do was to make himself safe against in- 
ternal disturbances and revolutions which 
might upset him. And it was then that he begot 
in the womb of his cold and cunning brain a 
policy that was all his own, except in so far as 



26 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

the Bulgarian atrocities, consequent on feuds 
between Bulgars and Greeks, may be considered 
the father of that hideous birth. But it was he 
who suckled and nourished it, it was from his 
brain that it emerged, full-grown and in panoply 
of armour, as from the brain of Olympian Zeus 
came Pallas Athene. This new policy was in 
flat contradiction of all the previous policy, as 
he had received it from his predecessors, of 
strengthening Turkey by tributes of man-power 
from his subject tribes, but it would, he thought, 
have the same result of keeping the Turk su- 
preme among the alien elements of the Empire. 
Times had changed; it behoved him to change 
the methods which hitherto had held together 
his hapless inheritance. 

Now Abdul Hamid was not in any sense a 
wise man, and the ability which has been at- 
tributed to him, in view of the manner in which 
he successfully defied the civilisations of Eu- 
rope, is based on premisses altogether false. 
He never really defied Europe at all; he always 
yielded, secure in his belief that Europe in the 
shape of the Balance of Power, was unanimous 
in keeping him where he was. He never even 
risked being turned out of Constantinople, for 
he knew — none better — that all Europe insisted 
on retaining him there. As regards wisdom, 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS Wi 

there was never a greater fool, but as regards 
cunning there was never a greater fox. He had 
a brain that was absolutely impervious to large 
ideas : the notion of consolidating and strength- 
ening his Empire by ameliorating its internal 
conditions, by bringing it within speaking dis- 
tance of the influence of civilisation and prog- 
ress, by taking advantage of and developing its 
immense natural resources, by employing the 
brains and the industry of his subject races, 
seems never to have entered his head. He could 
easily have done all this : there was not a Power 
in Europe that would not have lent him a help- 
ing hand in development and reform, in the 
establishment of a solvent state, in aiding the 
condition of the peoples over whom he ruled. 
In whatever he did, provided that it furthered 
the welfare of his subjects, whether Turk, Ar- 
menian, or Arab, the whole Concert of Europe 
Would have provided him with cash, with mis- 
sionaries, with engineers, and all the resources 
of the arts and sciences of peace and of prog- 
ress. But being a felon, with crime and cun- 
ning to take the place of wisdom, he preferred 
to develop his Empire on his own original lines. 
In Europe he was but suffered to exist. There 
remained Asia. 

The policy of previous Osmanli rulers has al- 



28 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

ready been roughly denned. They strengthened 
themselves and the military Turkish despotism 
round them by absorbing the manhood of the 
tribes over which they had obtained dominion. 
Abdul Hamid reversed that policy ; he strength- 
ened the Turkish supremacy, not by drawing 
into it the manhood of his subject peoples, but 
by destroying that manhood. In proportion, so 
his foxlike brain reasoned, as his alien subjects 
were weak, so were the Turks strong. A con- 
sistent weakening of alien nations would 
strengthen the hold of those who governed the 
Ottoman Empire. It was as if a man suffered 
from gout in his foot: he could get rid of the 
gout by wholesome living, the result of which 
would be that his foot ceased to trouble him. 
But the plan which he adopted was to cause his 
foot to mortify by process of inhuman savagery. 
When it was dead it would trouble him no 
longer. 

He was well aware that the Turkish people 
only comprised some forty per cent, of the popu- 
lation of the Turkish Empire : numerically they 
were weaker than the alien peoples who com- 
posed the rest of it. Something had to be done 
to bring the governing Power up to such a pro- 
portionate strength as should secure its suprem- 
acy, and the most convenient plan was to weaken 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 29 

J i m ' iiiiii.i iiiiiii — — ■ I | 

the alien elements. The scheme, though yet in- 
choate, had been tried with success in the case 
of the Bulgarians and Greeks, and to test it 
further he stirred up Albanians against the in- 
habitants of Old Servia with gratifying results. 
They weakened each other, and he further weak- 
ened them both by the employment of Turkish 
troops in Macedonia to quell the disturbances 
which he had himself fomented. There were 
massacres and atrocities, and no more trouble 
just then from Macedonia. Having thus tested 
his plan and found no flaw in it, he settled to 
adopt it. But European combinations did not 
really much interest him, for he was aware that 
the Great Powers, to whose sacred Balance he 
owed the permanence of his throne, would not 
tolerate interference with European peoples, 
and he turned his attention to Asia Minor. 
There were excrescences there which he could 
not absorb, but which might be destroyed. He 
could use the knife on living tissues which the 
impaired digestion of the Ottoman Empire 
could not assimilate. So he hit on this fresh 
scheme, which his hellish cunning devised with 
a matchless sense of the adaptation of the means 
to the end, and he created (though he did not 
live to perfect) a new policy that reversed the 
traditions of five hundred years. That is no 



30 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

»— — "^— mm m^m — ^— — i^— —————— —^ 

light task to undertake, and when we consider 
that since his deposition, now nine years ago, 
that policy has reaped results undreamed of 
perhaps by him, we can see how far-sighted his 
cunning was. To-day it is being followed out 
by the very combination that deposed him; his 
aims have been fully justified, and for that pre- 
cise reason we are right to classify him among 
the abhorred of mankind. He had an oppor- 
tunity such as is given to the few, and he made 
the utmost of it, even as his greater successor 
on the throne of Turkey for the present, namely 
Wilhelm n. of Prussia, has done, in the service 
of the devil. "Well done, thou good and faith- 
ful servant/ ' must surely have been his well- 
deserved welcome, when he left the hell he had 
made on earth for another. 

Of all his subjects the Armenians were the 
most progressive, the most industrious, the most 
capable. They therefore contributed, according 
to that perverted foxlike mind, one of the great- 
est menaces to the stability of his throne, which 
henceforth should owe its strength to the weak- 
ness of those it governed. They, as all the 
world knows, are a peaceful Christian people, 
and it was against them that Abdul Hamid di- 
rected the policy which he had tested in Europe. 
The instruments he employed to put it in force 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 31 



were the Kurds, a turbulent shepherd race 
marching with and mixed up among the Ar- 
menians. By this means he had the excuse 
ready that these massacres were local disturb- 
ances among remote and insubordinate tribes, 
one of whom, however, the Kurds, he armed 
with modern rifles and caused to be instructed 
in some elementary military training. Their 
task was to murder Armenians, their pay was 
the privilege to rape their girls and their 
women, and to rob the houses of the men they 
had killed. The Armenians resisted with at 
first some small success, upon which Abdul 
Hamid reinforced the Kurds with regular 
troops, and caused it to be proclaimed that this 
was a war of Moslems against the infidel, a 
Holy War. Moslem fanaticism, ever smoulder- 
ing and ready to burst into flames, blazed high, 
and a fury of massacres broke forth against all 
Armenians, east and west, north and south. 
The streets of Constantinople ran with their 
blood, and before Abdul Hamid was obliged by 
foreign civilised Powers to stop those holo- 
causts, he had so decimated the race that not 
for at least a generation would they conceivably 
be a menace again even to that zealous guardian 
of the supremacy in its own dominions of the 
Ottoman power. Very unwillingly, when 



32 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

obliged to do so, he whistled off his bands of 
Kurds, and dismissed them : unwillingly, too, he 
gave orders that the Armenian hunts which had 
so pleasantly diverted the sportsmen of Con- 
stantinople, must be abandoned: then was de- 
creed a ' ' close time ' ' for Armenians, the shoot- 
ing season was over. There is no exaggeration 
in this : eye-witnesses have recorded how at the 
close of the business day in Constantinople, 
shooting parties used literally to go out, and 
beat the coverts of tenement houses for Ar- 
menians, of whom there were at that time in 
Constantinople some 150,000. But when Abdul 
Hamid had finished his sport, I do not think 
more than 80,000 at the most survived. These 
were saved by the protests of Europe, and per- 
haps by the knowledge that if all the Armenians 
were killed, there could never be any more 
shooting. The Kurds also had lost a consider* 
able number of men, and that was far from dis- 
pleasing to the yellow-faced butcher of Yildiz. 
A little blood-letting among those turbulent 
Kurds was not at all a bad thing. 

Here, then, we see defined and at work the 
new Ottoman policy with regard to its peoples. 
Hitherto, it had been sufficient to take from 
them its fill of man-power, and leave the tribe 
in question to its own devices. There was no 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 33 

objection whatever to its developing the re- 
sources of its territory, to its increasing in 
prosperity and in population. Indeed the cen- 
tral Power was quite pleased that it should do 
so, for when next the gathering of taxes and 
youths came round the collectors would find a 
creditable harvest awaiting them. Such a tribe 
received no encouragement or help from the 
Government ; that would have been too much to 
expect, but as long as it kept quiet and obedient 
it might, without interference, prosper as well 
as it could. But now, in the last quarter of the 
nineteenth century, all that was changed; in- 
stead of a policy of neglect there was substi- 
tuted a policy of murder. The state no longer 
considered itself secure when in various parts 
of its dominions its subjects showed themselves 
progressive and industrious. They had to be 
kept down, and clearly the most efficient way of 
keeping people down was killing them. Let it 
not be supposed for a moment that either the 
first massacre, or any that followed, was the 
result of local disturbances and fanaticism. It 
was nothing of the sort : each was arranged and 
planned at Constantinople, as the official means, 
invented by the arch-butcher, Abdul Hamid, of 
maintaining in power the most devilish des- 
potism that has ever disgraced the world. 



34 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Something had to be done to prevent the alien 
tribes in Asia slipping ont of the noose of Otto- 
man strangulation, even as the European tribes 
had done, and forming themselves into separate 
and independent states. A ruler with progres- 
sive ideas, one who had any perception of the 
internal prosperity which alone can render an 
empire stable, would have made the attempt to 
weld his loose and wavering domination to- 
gether by encouraging and working for the 
prosperity of its component peoples, so that he 
might, though late in the day, give birth to a 
Turkey that was strong, because its citizens 
were prosperous and content. Not so did Abdul 
Hamid ; the Turkey that he sought to establish 
was merely to be strong because he had bat- 
tered into a blood-stained pulp the most pro- 
gressive and the most industrious of the alien 
peoples over whom he ruled. 

It is significant that, while yet the blood of. 
the murdered Christians was scarcely washed 
from the streets of Constantinople, the Emperor 
Wilhelm n. visited his brother-sovereign at 
Yildiz, after making his tour throughout the 
Holy Land. The two can hardly, in their inti- 
mate conversations, have completely avoided 
the subject of the massacres ; but after all, that 
was not such an unmanageably awkward topic, 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 35 

t — __ ■ — — — — i ■ 

for Wilhelm n. could tactfully have reminded 
Abdul Hamid that his own throne also was 
based on the murderous progress of the Teu- 
tonic Knights. Then there was the war between 
Turkey and Greece only lately concluded to dis- 
cuss, and there again — for the Emperor's sister 
was Crown Princess of Greece — conversation 
must have been a shade difficult. Altogether, in 
spite of the Emperor's lifelong desire to visit 
the Holy Places in Palestine, it was an odd mo- 
ment for a Christian monarch to visit the butcher 
of Constantinople. But the truth is that Wil- 
helm ii. had a very strong reason for going to 
see his brother, for the fruit of German policy 
in Turkey was already ripening and swelling on 
the tree, and the minor disadvantages of visit- 
ing this murderous tyrant while still his hands 
were red with blood was more than compensated 
for by the advantages of having a heart-to- 
heart talk with him on other subjects. Ger- 
many had already begun her peaceful penetra- 
tion, and the real motive of the Emperor's visit 
was, after swords and orders had been ex- 
changed, to make the definite request that bodies 
of colonising Germans should be allowed to set- 
tle on the Sultan's dominions in Asia Minor, 
and a hint no doubt was conveyed that there 
would be plenty of room for them now that 



36 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

there were so many Armenian farms unfortu- 
nately without a master. But, like Uriah Heep, 
the Emperor had attempted to pluck the fruit 
before it was ripe, or, to use a more exact sim- 
ile, before he was tall enough to reach it. In 
vain he represented to Abdul Hamid the im- 
mense advantages which would result to Turkey 
by the establishment of those Grott-like German 
settlers in Asia Minor. Out of his colossal 
egalo-megalomania, of which we know more 
now, he thought that any request which the All- 
Highest should deign to make must instantly be 
granted. But he met with a perfectly flat re- 
fusal, and the baffled All-Highest left Con- 
stantinople in an exceedingly bad temper, which 
quite undid all the good that the balm in Gilead 
and the sacred associations of Jerusalem had 
done him. 

It is pleasant to think of the Pan-Islamic 
merriment with which Abdul Hamid must have 
viewed the indignant exit of his Christian 
brother, who had come such a long way to see 
him, and was so tactful about the Armenian 
atrocities. He might perhaps — for those Chris- 
tians were very odd pigs — have expressed hor- 
ror or remonstrance. Not at all: he was much 
too anxious to get his request granted, to make 
himself disagreeable. But did his Christian 



THE THEORY OF THE OLD TURKS 37 

I H iiimii M i n ' — —,-— II 111. I,, 

brother really think that all those massacres 
over which Abdul Hamid had spent so much 
time and money, had been arranged in order to 
settle those nasty progressive Germans in the 
lands that had been so carefully depopulated? 
Why, the whole point of them had been that the 
Armenians were too progressive and prosper- 
ous, thus constituting a menace to the central 
Government, and certainly Abdul Hamid was 
not meaning to put in their place settlers even 
more progressive and with a stronger backing 
behind them. So off went the All-Highest back 
home again, very much vexed with Abdul 
Hamid, and possibly (if that was not sacri- 
legious) with himself for having been in too 
great a hurry. There was more spadework to 
be done yet before Turkey was ripe for open 
and avowed colonisation by the Fatherland. 

The episode, strictly historical, is of a certain 
importance, for it shows the date at which Wil- 
helm ii. thought that the time had come for 
Germans to colonise Turkey. The peaceful 
penetration (which now amounts to perfora- 
tion) was even then pretty far advanced. But 
Abdul Hamid seems to have seen the signifi- 
cance of the request, and for some little while 
after that German influence had a certain set- 
back in Turkey. The date of this marks an era, 



38 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 



and Germany, "deep patient Germany,' ' set to 
work again, in no way diseouraged, to set her 
cancer-nippers in the cancer that already had 
begun to eat the live tissues round it. 



CHAPTER n 

The Theoby of the New Tubks 

In the year 1908 a military group in Constanti- 
nople, styling itself the " Young Turk" party, 
seized and deposed Abdul Hamid, and shut him 
up at Salonika, there to spend the remainder of 
his infamous days. They put forth a Liberal 
programme of reformation, one that earned 
them at the moment the sympathy of civilised 
Europe (including Germany), and the Balance 
of Power very mistakenly and prematurely 
heaved a sigh of relief. For upwards of a cen- 
tury it had maintained in Constantinople the 
corrupt and bloody autocracy of the Sultans, 
fearing the European quarrels that would at- 
tend the dismemberment of that charnel-house 
of decay known as the Ottoman Empire, and 
now (just for the moment) it seemed as if a 
sudden rally had come to the Sick Man, and he 
showed signs of returning animation and whole- 
some vitality. The policy of the Powers, after 
a century of failure, looked as if it was justify- 
ing itself, and they were full of congratulations 

39 



40 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

towards Turkey and each other. But never, in 
the whole century of their pusillanimous cack- 
lings, had they made a greater mistake. 

Whether the Young Turks ever meant well or 
not, whether there was or was not a grain of 
sincerity in this profession of their policy, is a 
disputed question. There are those who say 
that originally they were prompted by patriotic 
and high-minded aims, when they proclaimed 
their object of "Organisation," and of reform. 
But all are agreed that it matters very little 
what their original aims were, so speedily did 
their Liberal intentions narrow down to an Otto- 
manisation such as Abdul Hamid had aimed at, 
but had been unable to accomplish before his 
evil sceptre ceased to sway the destinies of his 
kingdom. In any case this programme earned 
its authors the sympathy of Europe, and prob- 
ably this, and no more than this, prompted it. 
They wished to establish themselves, unques- 
tioned and undisturbed, and did so ; and I do not 
think we shall be far wrong if we take the orig- 
inal Young Turk programme about as seriously 
as we took the parody of a Parliament with 
which Abdul Hamid opened (as with a bless- 
ing) his atrocious reign. The very next year 
(1909) they permitted (if they did not arrange) 
the Armenian massacres at Adana, and the Bal- 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 41 

ance of Power began faintly to wonder whether 
the Young Turks in their deposition of Abdul 
Hamid had not slain an asp and hatched a cock- 
atrice. Given that their aims originally were 
sincere, we can but marvel at the swiftness of 
the corruption which in little more than a year 
had begun to lead them not into paths of reform 
and Liberal policy, but along the road towards 
which the butcher they had deposed had pointed 
the way. It must have made Abdul Hamid gnaw 
his nails and shake impotent hands to see those 
who had torn him from his throne so soon pur- 
suing the very policy which he invented, and to 
which he nominally owed his dethronement. 
Strange, too, was it that his overthrow should 
come from the very quarter to which he looked 
for security, for it was on the army that each 
Sultan in turn had most relied for the stability 
of his throne. But Abdul Hamid, in order, per- 
haps, to deal more effectually with the subject 
races he wished to exterminate, had introduced 
a system of foreign training for the officers of 
his army, a course of Potsdam efficiency, and it 
was just they, on whom Sultans from time im- 
memorial had relied, who knocked the prop of 
the army away from him. Though publicly, for 
the edification of Europe, his deposersprofessed 
a Liberal policy, it was not on account of Ar- 



42 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

———————— — M^ ^M^— B^— ^ — ■■■ 

menian massacres that they turned him off his 
throne, but because of the muddle and corrup- 
tion and debility of his rule. Herein we may 
easily trace the hand of Germany, no longer 
publicly beckoning as when Wilhelm n., just 
after the first Armenian massacres, made his 
request of the Sultan for the establishment in 
Turkey of German colonists, but working under- 
ground, sapping and mining like a mole. For 
Germany, her mind already fixed on securing 
Turkey as an instrument of her Eastern policy, 
wanted a strong Turkey, and without doubt de- 
sired to bring an end to the disorganisation and 
decay of the Empire, and create and at the same 
time interpenetrate an efficient state that should 
be useful to her. We may take it for granted 
that she, like the rest of Europe, welcomed any 
sign of regeneration in the Ottoman Empire, 
but there was an ulterior purpose behind that. 
Turkey, already grasped by the Prussian hand, 
must be in that hand a weapon fit for use, a 
blade on which she could rely. She strength- 
ened the Turkish army by the introduction of 
Prussian discipline, and worked on good ma- 
terial Already she has realised her ambition 
in this respect, and now controls the material 
which she then worked on. 
The troubled years of the Balkan wars which 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 43 

followed this false dawn, coupled with the loss 
of all the territory which remained to the Otto- 
man Empire in Europe, with the exception of 
Thrace, caused an immediate reaction from the 
open-minded policy of the Young Turks, if we 
decide to credit them at the outset with a sin- 
cere purpose. Organisation by a slightly dif- 
ferent spelling became Ottomanisation, and the 
aims of the Young Turks were identified with 
those of the Nationalist party which followed 
out and developed into a finished and super- 
fiendish policy the dreams of Abdul Hamid. He, 
as we have seen, had invented the idea of secur- 
ing Ottoman supremacy in the Empire, not as 
before by absorption of the strength of its sub- 
ject peoples, but by their extermination, and 
this formed part of the new programme which 
was to be more efficiently administered. Al- 
ready, in 1909, the experimental massacre at 
Adana took place, and the Young Turk party, 
with its possibly Liberal aims, had become a 
party that had as its main object a system of 
tyranny and murder such as the world had never 
seen. Simultaneously Turkey itself, National- 
ist party and all, became enslaved to German 
influence. Link by link the chains were forged 
and the manacles welded on, and before the 
European War broke out in 1914, the incarcera- 



44 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

I ! 

tion of Turkey in Germany was complete, and 
Wilhelm n. had a fine revenge for the snub in- 
flicted on him by Abdul Hamid when he pro- 
posed the scheme of German colonisation in the 
lands depopulated by the Armenian massacres 
of 1895. 

From the first the aim of the Nationalists, 
who thus formed so deadly a blend with the 
Young Turk party, was Ottomanisation, or the 
establishment within the Empire of an Ottoman 
domination which should be pure and undefiled, 
and in which none of the subject peoples, be 
they Armenians or Kurds, Arabs or Greeks or 
Jews, Christian or Moslem, should have any 
part. The inception of the scheme was no 
doubt inspired by the example given by Prus- 
sia's treatment of the Poles, and Hungary's of 
Roumans and Slovaks. But in thoroughness of 
method Prussia's pupil was to prove Prussia's 
master, for it aimed not merely at expropria- 
tion, but extermination, and sought to become 
strong, not merely by weakening alien elements, 
but by abolishing them. It did not set this out 
quite explicitly in its manifestoes and the reso- 
lutions of its congresses, but two extracts, the 
first from the proceedings of the ' ' Committee of 
Union and Progress, ' ' held in Constantinople in 
1911, have a sinister suggestiveness about them 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 45 



for which the acts and measures of the Com- 
mittee had already supplied the comment. 

"The formation of new parties in the Cham- 
ber or in the country must be suppressed, and 
the emergence of new Liberal ideas prevented. 
Turkey must become a really Mohammedan 
country, and Moslem influence must be prepon- 
derant. Every other religious propaganda 
must be suppressed. . . . Sooner or later the 
complete Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects 
must be effected ; it is clear, however, that this 
can never be attained by persuasion, but that we 
must resort to armed force. . . . Other na- 
tionalities must be denied the right of organisa- 
tion, for decentralisation and autonomy are 
treason to the Turkish Empire. ' ' 

Could there be a completer reversion to the 
policy of Abdul Hamid, than this formal resolu- 
tion, passed within three years of the time when 
the Young Turks deposed him? The conviction 
begins to dawn on one — as it began to dawn on 
the Balancers of Power — that he owed his down- 
fall not to his illiberal and butcherous policy, 
but because he was not thorough enough. 

The second extract, from a pamphlet by Jelal 
Noury Bey, may be added, which defines the 
policy, not with regard to the Christian or Jew- 
ish subjects of the Turks, but with regard to the 



46 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Arabs, Moslem by creed, and the guardians of 
the Holy Cities. 

* ' It is a peculiarly imperious necessity of our 
existence for us to Turkise the Arab lands, for 
the particularistic idea of nationality is awak- 
ing among the younger generation of Arabs, and 
already threatens us with a great catastrophe. 
Against this we must be forearmed." 

The design of Ottomanisation soon began to 
take practical form. Ottomanisation was to 
be the highest expression of patriotism, and any 
means which secured it, massacres such as, in 
1909, had taken place at Adana, or the treat- 
ment accorded to the Greeks and Bulgarians 
who remained in Thrace after the Balkan wars, 
were in accordance with the new "Liberal" 
gospel. Thrace was the only territory left to 
the Turks in Europe, and as it was largely 
populated by Greeks and Bulgarians, it could 
not be considered as sufficiently Ottomanised. 
A massacre under the very eyes of Europe was 
perhaps dangerous, so it sufficed to put the en- 
tire non-Turkish population over the frontier 
and lay hands on their property. In fact this 
was the first of the "deportation" schemes 
which, in 1915, proved so successful with the 
Armenians, and the effect of it was that neither 
Greeks nor Bulgarians were left in Thrace. 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 47 

Then followed the expulsion of Greeks from the 
Mediterranean sea-board, but this was never 
completely carried out because the European 
war intervened, and the attention of the Na- 
tionalists was claimed by their over-lord. 
Later, as we shall see, a further deportation of 
Greeks was begun, but again that was stopped, 
for Germany saw that it would never do to have 
her Turkish allies murdering settlers of the 
same blood as those she hoped would become 
her allies. Of course, when it was only a ques- 
tion of Armenians she did not interfere. 

The design, then, of the new "Liberal" re- 
gime, of which those three measures, the mas- 
sacres at Adana, the expulsion of Greeks and 
Bulgarians from Thrace, and of Greeks from the 
sea-board of the Mediterranean, were early in- 
stances, was to restore the absolute supremacy 
of the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. It was ob- 
vious that the problem was one of considerable 
difficulty, since the Turks at the time composed 
only some forty per cent, of the whole popu- 
lation. They numbered about 8,000,000, while 
in the Empire were included about 7,000,000 
Arabs, 2,000,000 Greeks, 2,000,000 Armenians, 
and 3,000,000 more of smaller nationalities, such 
as Kurds, Druses, and Jews. But the Turks 
were backed by Germany, and nowadays, since 



48 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

the abolition of the Capitulations, which leaves 
all alien races unprotected by foreign Powers, 
such as survive, after the extermination of the 
Armenians, are completely at the mercy of the 
Government in Constantinople. All these peo- 
ples speak a different language from the Turks, 
and have a different religion, for the National- 
ist party, with a view to the Ottomanisation of 
the Arabs, have definitely stated that Arab Mos- 
lems are not of the true faith, and that their 
own Allah (in whose name they subsequently 
exterminated the Armenians) is the God of 
Love — German equivalent Gott — whereas the 
Arab Allah is the God of vengeance. The sin- 
ister motive in this discovery needs no comment, 
for it is obvious that it releases the Ottoman 
Government from the prohibition in the Koran, 
whereby Moslem may not fight against Moslem. 
Therefore the Arabs were declared not to be 
true Moslems. Later on, that motive was trans- 
lated into practical measures. 

Among the first tasks with regard to the Ar- 
abs that faced the Nationalist party from what 
we may call the pacific side of their mission 
was to substitute the Turkish language for Ara- 
bic. Kemal Bey, a Nationalist of Salonika, with 
the help of Ziya Bey, collected round him a 
group of young writers, and these proceeded to 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 49 

translate the Koran out of Arabic into Turkish, 
and to publish the prayers for the Caliphate 
in their own language, and orders went out that 
these revised versions should be used in all 
mosques. Turkish was to be the official lan- 
guage for use in all public proclamations, and, 
with Prussian thoroughness, it was even substi- 
tuted on such railway tickets as had hitherto 
been printed in Arabic. The new Turkish 
tongue (Yen! Lisan) had also to be purged of 
all foreign words, but here some difficulty was 
experienced, for Persian and Arabic formed an 
enormous percentage in the language as hither- 
to employed, and the promoters of this Ottoman 
purity of tongue found themselves left with a 
very jejune instrument for the rhapsodies of 
their patriotic aims. Poets in especial (for the 
Nationalists, like all well-equipped founders of 
romantic movements, had their bards) found 
themselves in sore straits owing to the limited 
vocabulary ; and we read of one, Mehmed Emin 
Bey, who was forced to publish his odes in small 
provincial papers, since no well-established 
journal would admit so scrannel an expression 
of views however exalted. 1 But the translation 
of the Koran was the greatest linguistic feat, 

1 This thwarted poet retired from the Committee of Union 
and Progress not long after, and his place was taken by Enver* 



50 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

— -* 

and Tekin Alp, the most prominent exponent 
of Nationalism, refers to it as one of the noblest 
tasks undertaken by the new movement. It mat- 
tered not at all that by religious ordinance the 
translation of the Koran into any other tongue 
was a sin. "The Nationalists," he tells us, 
"have cut themselves off from the superstitious 
prejudice." A further attempt was made to 
substitute Turkish letters for Arabic letters in 
the alphabet, but this seems to have presented 
insuperable difficulties, and I gather that it has 
been abandoned. 

The Ottomanisation of religion and language, 
then, was among the pacific methods of spread- 
ing Pan-Turkism through the Empire. A mon- 
strous idol was set up, a Hindenburg idol, in 
front of which all peoples and languages, not 
Christians alone, but Moslems, were bound to 
prostrate themselves. Indeed it was against 
Arabs mainly that these provisions were direct- 
ed, for the Arabs constituted the most menac- 
ing obstacle to the spread of Ottomanisation, 
since they numbered in the Empire only a mil- 
lion less than the Turks themselves. It was or- 
dained by statute that no Arab could have a seat 
on the Committee of Union and Progress, and 
the Cabinet similarly was purged of any Greek 
or Armenian element. Never any more must 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 51 

there be new parties in the Chamber, never any- 
more must Liberal ideas (to champion which the 
New Turk party had come into being) be al- 
lowed to prick up their pernicious heads. For 
the Nationalist party, with whom the New Turks 
were now identical, had taken as their creed all 
that the deposed Abdul Hamid stood for, and 
only differed from him in that as their schemes 
developed they looked forward to logical conclu- 
sions far beyond what he had ever dreamed of. 
But Abdul Hamid may, I think, be taken to 
be the true founder of the new Nationalism : at 
any rate it was he who had first seen the pos- 
sibilities of massacre as a means of maintain- 
ing Ottoman supremacy. In the hands of Na- 
tionalists that was to prove a more effective 
weapon than the printing of railway tickets in 
Turkish. But already before the European 
War the Nationalists had vastly extended his 
ideas, and had seen the danger of allowing even 
Arabs to have a standing of any kind in the 
new state. Henceforth all subject people were 
to be rayas, cattle, as in the old days of the Sul- 
tans who absorbed the strength of the aliens, 
but did not exterminate them. But now the 
cattle were not only to be used for milk, but 
were to be slaughtered when advisable. Till 
then they must be dumb, or speak the language 



52 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

of their masters only, for this alone can save 
them from the shambles. Ahmed Sherif Bey, 
a prominent Nationalist, lays this down. "It 
is the business of the Porte to make the Arabs 
forget their own language, and to impose upon 
them instead that of the nation that rules them. 
If the Porte loses sight of this duty, it will be 
digging its grave with its own hands, for if the 
Arabs do not forget their language, their his- 
tory, and their customs, they will seek to re- 
store their ancient empire on the ruins of Otto- 
manism and of Turkish rule in Asia." 

Here, then, is the definite statement of the 
Nationalists' hostility to all things Arab, and 
we shall see how they translated it into practice. 
Even Moslems were but cattle for them, as also 
were Armenians and Greeks and Kurds. Ar- 
menians were doomed to be the first complete 
sacrifice on the bloody altar of the National- 
ists, and, as a Turkish gendarme engaged in 
that sacrifice said to a Danish Red Cross nurse, 
"First we kill the Armenians, then the Greeks, 
and then the Kurds.' ' And if he had been a 
Progressive Minister he would certainly have 
added, "And then the Arabs." 

It was not only within the present limits of 
the Ottoman Empire that the Committee of 
Union and Progress proposed to accomplish 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 53 

their unitive purpose, for after having seen a 
glorious and exclusive Turkey arise over the 
depopulated territories of their alien peoples, 
a vaster vision, for an account of which we are 
indebted to Tekin Alp, opened before their 
prophetic eyes. Out of the 10,000,000 inhabi- 
tants of Persia they claim that one-third are 
of true Turkish blood, and in the new Turkey 
which, so they almost pathetically hope, will be 
established at the conclusion of the European 
War by the help of Wilhelm n, those Persian 
Turks must be incorporated into the true fold 
of Allah, God of Love. The province of Adar- 
baijan, for instance, the richest and most en- 
lightened district of Persia, they claim, is en- 
tirely Turkish, and here the needful rectification 
will be made in the new atlases that bear the 
imprimatur of Potsdam. Similarly, all the 
country south of the Caucasus must rank as 
Turkish territory, since the Turks form from 
fifty to eighty per cent, of the population; all 
Kazan, for the same reason, is truly Turkish, 
with the alluvial plains of the Volga, while the 
Crimea, so Tekin Alp discovers, is also a lost 
sheep longing for the Turkish fold. All this is 
Turkey (or Turania) Irredenta, and, may we 
not add : — 



54 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

■ ! 

"Jerusalem and Madagascar 
And North and South Amerikee." 

And then what a glorious future awaits the 
Power that Europe once thought of as a sick 
man. "With the crushing of Russian despot- 
ism,' ' exclaims Tekin Alp, "by the brave Ger- 
man, Austrian, and Turkish armies, thirty to 
forty million Turks will receive their independ- 
ence. With the ten million Ottoman Turks this 
will form a nation of fifty millions, advancing 
towards a great civilisation which may perhaps 
be compared to that of Germany, in that it will 
have the strength and energy to rise even 
higher. In some ways it will be even superior 
to the degenerate French and English civilisa- 
tions.' ' 

The arithmetic and the enthusiasm of the fore- 
going paragraph are, of course, those of Tekin 
Alp, from whose book, The Turkish and Pan- 
Turkish Ideal, the quotation is made. The work 
was published in 1915, and, appearing as it did 
after the beginning of the European War, it 
is but natural to find in it an expression not only 
of the Nationalist aims for Turkey, but of the 
Prussian aims for Turkey, or, to speak more 
correctly, of the dream which Prussia has in- 
duced in a hypnotised Turkey. It sets forth 
in fact the bait which Prussia has dangled in 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 55 

front of Turkey, the hunger for which has in- 
spired the projected future which is here 
sketched out ; and significantly enough this book 
has been spread broadcast over Turkey by the 
agency of German propagandists. The Otto- 
manisation of the Empire, the vision of its fur- 
ther extension, free from all consideration of 
subject peoples, was exactly the lure which was 
most likely to keep the Turks staunch to their 
Prussian masters. It will be noticed that there 
is no suggestion of the Turks recovering their 
lost provinces and kingdoms in Europe, Greece, 
Bulgaria, Rumania, Servia, and the rest, for 
it would never do to let Fox Ferdinand awake 
from his hypnotic sleep of a sort of Czardom 
over the Balkans, or cease to dangle dreams, 
that included even Constantinople before the 
shifty eye of King Constantine. So, before 
Turkey was spread the prospect of appropriat- 
ing Russian and Persian spoils: Prussia had 
already given the lost Turkish kingdoms in 
Europe elsewhere, but would there not be a dis- 
membered Russian Empire to dispose of? The 
Crimea, the province of Kazan, the province of 
Trans-Caucasia : all these might be held before 
Turkey's nose, as a dog has a piece of meat 
held up before it to make it beg. Then there 
was the province of Adarbaijan : certainly Tur- 



56 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

key might be permitted to promise herself that, 
without incurring the jealousy of Austria or 
Bulgaria. Greedily Turkey took the bait. She 
gulped it down whole, and never considered that 
there was a string attached to it, or that, should 
ever the time come when Germany, the con- 
queror of the world, would be in a position to 
reward her Allies with the realisation of the 
dreams she had induced, the string would be 
pulled, and up, with retchings and vomitings, 
would come these succulent morsels of Eussia 
and Persia. Indeed these bright pictures flashed 
on to the sheet as the visions of Nationalists 
are but the slides in a German magic-lantern, 
designed to keep Turkey amused, and it was 
with the same object that Ernst Marre, in his 
Die Turken und Wir nach dem Kriege, was bid- 
den to make other pictures ready in case Turkey 
grew fractious or sleepy. "From the ruins of 
antiquity," he says, when speaking of the Ot- 
toman Empire, "new life will spring, if we can 
manage to raise the treasures which time and 
sand have covered.' ' Then he remembers that 
he must be less Pan-Germanic for the moment, 
and dangles the bait again. ' i In doing this, ' ' he 
adds, "we are benefiting Turkey, The Turk- 
ish state is no united whole, and it has always 
been very difficult to govern. Turks, Arabs, 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 57 

i 

Greeks, Armenians, Kurds, cannot be welded 
together. This is a war of liberation for Tur- 
key. . . . Only by energetic interference, and 
by ' expelling ' the obstinate Armenian element 
could the Ottoman Empire get rid of a Russian 
domination. . . . The non-Turkish population 
of the Ottoman Empire must be Ottomanised." 

There is no need for further quotations, 
which might be multiplied indefinitely. The 
Prussian programme is for the moment identi- 
cal with the Turkish Nationalist programme: 
Turkey, in order to be kept " in with" Germany, 
must be encouraged to dream of depopulated 
Armenia (that dream has come tragically true) 
and of annexations in Russia and Persia. All 
this fitted in with the Turkish programme: 
Germany had scarcely to inspire, only to en- 
courage. That encouragement she gave, for, 
simultaneously she was penetrating Turkey as 
water penetrates a sponge, and reducing it to 
the position of a vassal state. To keep Turkey 
happy she allowed the Armenian massacres to 
run their deadly course, and only interfered 
with other massacres when they did not suit her 
purpose. 

But supposing (to suppose the impossible) 
that a peace to the European War was dictated 
by Germany, how much of the future Pan-Turk- 



58 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

i i 

ish programme would be realised ? Would there 
be a Turkey at all? I think not: there would 
be a Germany in Europe, and a Germany in 
Asia, where Turkey once was. Indeed, in all 
but name, they are in existence now; so com- 
plete, as we shall see, has been Germany's pen- 
etration of the Ottoman Empire. Just for the 
present she calls herself Turkey in those re- 
gions ; that is her incognito. But Turkey as an 
independent Power has already ceased to exist, 
and Tekin Alp and the Nationalists still dream 
on with rainbow visions of Ottomanisation, the 
vistas of which stretch far into Persia and the 
plains of the Volga. And all the while she has 
been put out like a candle, and all that is left 
of her is the smouldering wick ready to be 
pinched between the horny fingers of her step- 
mother. There she stands, her stepmother, 
with her grinning teeth already disclosing the 
Wolf. . . . 

Whatever the end of the European War may 
be, in no circumstances can the dreams of the 
Nationalists be realised. Even if Germany and 
her arms were so victorious that Russia lay at 
her feet a mere inert carcase ready for the 
chopper, she would no more dream of giving 
Russian provinces to an independent Turkey 
than she would hand over to her Berlin itself. 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 59 

And if, as we know, Germany can never be vic- 
torious, will the Allies once more strive to keep 
the Sick Man alive, or leave in his ruthless 
power the peoples whom he is longing to exter- 
minate? Even Tekin Alp can hardly expect 
that. 

/\ Here then, in brief, is the policy of New Tur- 
key. Its subject peoples — Armenians, Arabs, 
Greeks, Kurds, and Jews — are to be totally un- 
represented in its councils, though together they 
number sixty per cent, of the population of the 
Empire. But they are not only to be unrepre- 
sented in Government — they are, if the pro- 
gramme is to be carried conclusively out, to 
have no existence. In accordance with the plans 
of the murderous ruffians who to-day admin- 
ister the Nationalist policy, those of the Arme- 
nians who have not fled beyond the frontiers 
have already been exterminated, and the same 
fate threatens Arabs, Greeks, and Jews. Hence, 
when the Allied Governments wrote their joint 
note to President Wilson, they stated that 
among their aims in the war was ' t the liberation 
of the peoples who now lie beneath the mur- 
derous tyranny of the Turks.' ' From that 
avowed determination they will never recede. 

Note. — It is to be hoped that Tekin Alp's pamphlet, 
Turks and the Pan-Turkish Ideal, may soon be acces- 



60 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

sible to English readers. The author is a Macedonian 
Jew who writes under the pseudonym of Tekin Alp, 
and his mind is such that he appears to find romance 
in the idea of a united Turkey purged by indiscrimin- 
ate massacre from all alien elements. But he sets 
forth with admirable lucidity the aims of the Nation- 
alist party and the steps already achieved by them in 
their progress towards their ideal. Already the se- 
questered ladies of the harem have come out of their 
retirement and join in the crusade, and not only do 
men give lectures to women, but "women mount the 
platform and address the men." There are corpora- 
tions to advance economic organisations, boy-scout 
centres all over the Empire, and "intellectual par- 
ties'' among the guilds of merchants — England and 
Russia appear as the most virulent foes of Pan-Turk- 
ism, "the colossus of darkest barbarism joined with 
the colossus of a degenerate civilisation." 

In the second part of his pamphlet Tekin Alp 
passes on with an enthusiasm which is as sincere as it 
is pathetic to the vision of a tremendous Turkey, ex- 
tending from Thrace on the west to the Desert of Gobi 
on the east. It embraces, as his map shows, Egypt as 
far south as Victoria Nyanza, Arabia, Persia, the 
greater part of India, the littoral of the Black Sea, the 
plains of the Volga, the circuit of the Caspian Sea 
and the Aral Sea, and in the north-east nearly touches 
Tomsk. All this naturally is dependent on complete 
German victory in the war, and, pathetically enough, 
Tekin Alp appears to think that his ideal Turkey 
will meet with the approval of Germany. Indeed it is 
no wonder that his pamphlet is circulated broadcast 
by German propagandists, for it is precisely what 
Germany wants Turkey to believe. 

The romance of the movement appeals also very 
strongly to Ziya Gok Alp, the official bard of the 



THE THEORY OF THE NEW TURKS 61 

butchers of Constantinople. He has written a sort of 
Ode to Attila, quoted by Tekin Alp, which is a fine 
frenzy in favour of barbarism. This preposterous 
poem begins: 

' ' I do not read the famous deeds of my ancestors in 
the dead, faded, dusty leaves of the history books, but 
in my own veins, in my own heart. My Attila, my 
Huns, those heroic figures which stand for the proud 
fame of my race, appear in those dry pages to our 
malicious and slanderous age as covered with shame 
and disgrace, while in reality they are no less than 
Alexander and Caesar/ ' etc. etc. 

I have been at present unable to ascertain whether 
it is true that the German Emperor has set it to music, 
under the impression that it refers to him and the 
German armies. It is very popular in Prussia, which 
need arouse no surprise. 



CHAPTEK IK 

The End of the Armenian Question 

We have traced in brief the backward progress 
of Ottoman domination, and have seen how, 
from the rough and ready methods of a mili- 
tary barbarism, the Turks evolved a more em- 
phatic and a more highly organised negation of 
all those principles which we may sum up under 
the general term of civilisation. The compara- 
tively humane neglect of the unfortunate alien 
peoples herded within the frontiers of earlier 
Sultans was improved upon by Abdul Hamid, 
who struck out the swifter and superior meth- 
ods of maintaining the dominating strength of 
the Turkish element in the kingdom not by the 
absorption of subject peoples, but by their ex- 
termination. This in turn, this new and effect- 
ive idea, served as a first sketch of an artist 
with regard to his finished picture, and starting 
with that the Nationalist party enlarged and 
elaborated it into that masterpiece of massacre 
which they exhibited to the world in the years 
1915 and 1916 of the Christian Era, when from 

62 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 63 

end to end of the Empire there flashed the sig- 
nal for the extermination of the Armenian race. 
Abdul Hamid was but tentative and experimen- 
tal as compared to their systematised thorough- 
ness, but then the Nationalist party had learned 
thoroughness under the tutelage of its Prussian 
masters. And in addition to instruction they 
had had the advantage of seeing how Prussian 
firmness, with the soothing balm of Kultur to 
follow, had dealt with the now-subject remnant 
of Belgians. That was the way to treat subject 
people: "the first care of a state is to protect 
itself," as Enver and Talaat could read in the 
text-books now translated into Turkish, in cop- 
ies, maybe, presented to them by their Master 
in Berlin, and Turkey could best show the proof 
of her enlightenment and regeneration, by fol- 
lowing in the footsteps of Prussian Kultur. 
Perhaps a few thousand innocent men might 
suffer the inconvenience of having their nails 
torn out, of being bastinadoed to death, of be- 
ing shot, burned or hanged, perhaps a few thou- 
sand girls and women might die by the wayside 
in being deported to "agricultural colonies," 
might fall victims to the lusts of Turkish sol- 
diers, or have babes torn from their wombs, but 
these paltry individual pains signified nothing 
compared to the national duty of • ' suffering the 



64 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

state to run no risks." As one of this party of 
Union and Progress said, "The innocent of to- 
day may be the guilty of to-morrow, ' ' and it 
was therefore wise to provide that for innocent 
and guilty alike there should he no to-morrow 
at all. Years before the statesmanship of Ab- 
dul Hamid had prophetically foreseen the dawn- 
ing of this day, when he remarked, "The way 
to get rid of the Armenian question is to get 
rid of the Armenians," and temporarily for 
twenty years he did get rid of the Armenian 
question. But when, in 1915, Talaat Bey com- 
pleted his arrangements for a further contribu- 
tion to the solution of the same problem, he said, 
"After this, there will be no Armenian ques- 
tion for fifty years. ' ' As far as we can judge, 
he rather under-estimated the thoroughness of 
his arrangements. 1 

The race thus marked out for extermination 
was one of the oldest settlements in Asiatic 
Turkey. Originally it was confined to Armenia 
proper, a highland district comprising part of 
what is now the Russian province of Trans-Cau- 
casia, part of Persia, notably the province of 

1 Lately (September 1917), when the massacres were all over, 
Talaat, speaking at a Congress of the Committee of Union and 
Progress, upheld as right and proper the treatment of the 
Armenian race. 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 65 

Adarbaijan, and, within the Turkish frontier, 
the province of Armenia, itself. According to 
legend, which may well be correct, the Armen- 
ians were the oldest national Christian Church 
in the world, with a liturgy that dates from the 
first century of the Christian Era, while their 
translation of the Bible dates from the early 
years of the fifth century a.d. Here in these up- 
lands they formed a compact and homogeneous 
population, spread over towns and country 
alike, and were occupied in the main with agra- 
rian and pastoral pursuits. But they had in 
addition much of the versatility and business 
capacity of the Jews, as well as a strong liberal- 
mindedness towards progress and education, 
and thus, while they still continued up to the 
present day their pastoral life in the country- 
side, others gravitated towards towns, and by 
degrees they spread over a large part of the 
Turkish Empire, until most of the towns in Tur- 
key had a progressive and peaceful quota of 
Armenian citizens, tolerated by their Moslem 
neighbours, and, though possessed of no great 
share of political influence, powerful, in that the 
trade and commerce of inland Turkey was; 
largely in their hands. Wherever they went 
they established their schools ; many were law- 
yers, doctors, and professors of education. Cer- 



66 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

— i^ — —i » 

tain repressive measures were brought to bear 
on them ; they were not, for instance, allowed to 
carry arms, except when, in accordance with 
Turkish conscriptive laws, they served in the 
Ottoman army. But many of them, by paying 
their exemption money, got off military service, 
and they confined themselves to the arts of 
peace, whether pastorally in their native high- 
lands, or in the shops and offices of the towns to 
which they migrated. They were not, till the 
time of Abdul Hamid, held to be in any sense a 
national danger, for, except in Armenia proper, 
they were too scattered and too peace-loving an 
element of the population to be capable of unit- 
ed action, and never do they seem to have pro- 
voked any outburst of Moslem fanaticism. 
They had local quarrels and fights with the more 
warlike Kurds who encroached on Armenia, and 
in the towns where they settled they often in- 
curred the vague jealousy and dislike which are 
the penalties of a race superior morally and in- 
tellectually to those among whom they live. But 
that superiority constituted in course of time the 
" Armenian question,' ' to which Abdul Hamid 
alluded. In all, some sixty years ago their en- 
tire race numbered about 4,000,000 persons, of 
whom about 1,250,000 inhabited Russian Trans- 
Caucasia, about 150,000 were in the province of 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 67 

Adarbaijan, and there were smaller bodies of 
them in Austria and India. The remainder, 
some 2,500,000, were spread over Armenia, over 
the villages and towns of Turkey, notably the 
eastern edge of the Cilician uplands, while in 
Constantinople itself there were certainly not 
less than 150,000, and probably as many as 
200,000. To-day, the male portion of the Ar- 
menian race in the Ottoman Empire has prac- 
tically ceased to exist: a quarter of a million 
men and women escaped over the Eussian fron- 
tier, five thousand escaped to Egypt, and there 
are a few thousand women and girls (it is im- 
possible to ascertain the exact number) in Turk- 
ish harems. Turkism, as administered by Ab- 
dul Hamid first, then, far more efficiently, by 
Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, has solved the 
Armenian question. 

The history of its solution falls under two 
heads, of which the first concerns the manner in 
which it was solved in Armenia itself, where the 
population was almost exclusively Armenian, 
both in towns and in the country. Here the 
eastern and north-eastern frontiers of Turkey, 
across which lie the province of Eussian Trans- 
Caucasia and Persia, pass through the middle 
of districts peopled by men of Armenian blood, 
and when, in the autumn of 1914, the Turks 



68 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

made their entry into the European War, their 
eastern armies, operating against Russia, found 
themselves confronted by troops among whom 
were many Armenians, while in their advance 
into the Persian province of Adarbaijan, there 
were in the ranks of their opponents, Armenians 
and Syriac Christians. They advanced in fact, 
in the first weeks of the war, into a country 
largely peopled with men of the same blood as 
those on their own side of the frontier. Though 
the edict had not yet come from Constantinople 
for the massacre of the Armenians (Talaat Bey 
did not complete his arrangements till the fol- 
lowing April) , the slaughter of them began then, 
first in the advance of the Turkish armies, and 
following on that movement, which lasted but a 
few weeks, in their subsequent retreat before 
the Russians. All villages through which the 
Turkish armies passed were plundered and 
burned, all the inhabitants on whom the Turks 
could lay their hands were killed. Sometimes 
women and children were given to the Kurds, 
who formed bands of irregular troops in con- 
junction with the Turkish army, and these were 
outraged before they were slaughtered. A price 
was put on every Christian head, and in the 
Turkish retreat the corpses were thrust into the 
wells in order to pollute them. The excuse for 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 69 

this, as given by German apologists (not apol- 
ogists, perhaps, so much as supporters and ad- 
herents of the policy), was that since behind the 
Turkish lines the country was populated by a 
race of the same blood as that through which 
they advanced, and then retreated, extermina- 
tion was necessary in order to prevent or to 
punish treachery and collusion. But I have 
been nowhere able to find that there were in- 
stances of such, nor that the Turks put forward 
that excuse themselves. Indeed it would have 
been an unnecessary explanation, for but a few 
months after the opening of the war, Talaat 
Bey's plans were complete, and the extermina- 
tion of Armenians hundreds of miles from any 
sphere of military operations rendered it need- 
less to say anything about it, or to invent in- 
stances of treachery if there were actually none 
to hand. 

Simultaneously the massacre of Armenians 
behind the Turkish lines began. The whole male 
population of the district round Bitlis was mur- 
dered, so too were all males in Bitlis itself. 
Then all women and children were driven in, as 
a herdsman might drive sheep, from the reeking 
villages round, and, for purposes of convenience, 
concentrated in Bitlis. When they were all col- 
lected, they were driven in a flock to the edge of 



70 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

the Tigris, shot, and the corpses were thrown 
into the river. That was the solution of the 
Armenian question in Bitlis. 

North-west of Bitlis, and some sixty miles 
distant, lies the town of Mush. It used to con- 
tain about 25,000 Armenian inhabitants, and in 
the district round there were some three hun- 
dred villages chiefly consisting of Armenians. 
Arrangements were on foot for a general mas- 
sacre there when the arrival of Russian troops 
at Liz, some fifteen hours' march away, caused 
the execution of it to be put off for a while, and 
up till July a few folk only had been shot, and 
a few beaten to death, as a warning to those 
treacherously inclined. Then the Russians, in 
the face of superior forces, had to retire again, 
and the massacres were put on a systematic 
footing. The account which follows is based on 
four independent authorities: (1) The state- 
ment of a German eye-witness in Mush in 
charge of an Armenian orphanage; (2) the 
statement of a woman deported from a village 
near, and subsequently killed by Kurds; (3) in- 
formation from refugees escaped to Trans- 
Caucasia; (4) the journal Horizon of Tiflis. 
These supplement each other, often verify each 
other, and in no instance are contradictory. 

Rumours of an impending massacre reached 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 71 

___ ._.... .J_J i.i. | III ■!!■ .Illl»» « . I - I I^II »l— llll HI IIH1IIIIIM— —H 

Mush before the end of 1914, at a time when 
the massacres across the frontier had be- 
gun. The Mutessarif of Mush, an intimate 
friend of Enver Pasha, had openly declared that 
"at an opportune moment" the slaughter of 
the whole Armenian race was contemplated, and 
later Ekran Bey corroborated this in the pres- 
ence of the American and German Consuls. 
Enver indeed seems to have been the chief or- 
ganiser with regard to the massacres in Ar- 
menia itself, while Talaat Bey saw to the fate 
of those dispersed in towns throughout the rest 
of Turkey. During the whole of that winter, a 
very severe one, signs of the approaching ex- 
termination multiplied. In the villages round 
fresh taxes were introduced, and when Ar- 
menians were unable to pay they were beaten 
to death, while, if they resisted, the village in 
question was burned. But by July 1915 (after 
the unavoidable delay caused by the proximity 
of Eussian troops) all was ready, and the mas- 
sacre began in earnest. 

Four battalions of Turkish troops arrived 
from Constantinople, and an order was given 
that all Armenians must leave the town within 
three days, after "registering themselves" at 
the Government office. The women and children 
were to remain, but their money and their prop- 



72 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

erty would be confiscated. Within two hours 
after that, owing, I suppose, to fresh orders 
from Constantinople, the guns opened fire on 
the crowds in the streets flocking to the registry 
offices, and after that systematic house-to-house 
murder began. Prominent Armenians were tor- 
tured to death, houses containing women and 
children were set on fire, a body of men col- 
lected together was thrown into the river, girls 
were outraged and slaughtered. For two days 
the massacre continued, and by the end of the 
second day the Armenian question was solved 
as regards Mush. 

In the surrounding villages the same Prus- 
sian thoroughness was observed, and out of all 
the inhabitants of the plain 5,000 only seemed to 
have survived, who fled to Sasun (there to be 
subsequently massacred in 1916), while a few 
from outlying villages escaped to the Russian 
troops. In certain villages the girls and young 
women were given to the' Kurd soldiery, who 
raped them publicly in the presence of their 
families, not sparing girls of eight and ten years 
of age, who then, bleeding and violated, were 
shot in company with the old women, for whom 
the Kurds (inspired by Allah, the God of Love) 
had no use. Elsewhere, as the story of a de- 
ported woman from Kheiban tells us, the women 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 7S 



guarded by Kurdish troops were driven out of 
their villages, leaving behind the corpses of the 
men and of old women who could not walk, and 
for days were marched along the roads, nearly 
naked, under the fierce heat of the July sun. 
Once every other day they were given bread, 
but all did not get it, and many fell exhausted 
by the wayside, and were either whipped to 
their feet again or allowed to lie down and die. 
As they passed through villages Kurds would 
come out and rape a girl or two, and when they 
halted at night their guards would come among 
them. . . . Some few escaped; the rest, in 
dwindling company, went on through days of 
blinding sun and nights of shame till at last 
there were only a few remaining. It was not 
worth while going farther, for the work of En- 
ver Pasha was nearly done, and the rest were 
pushed into the river. One alone survived, who 
could swim, and she, with her two-year-old baby 
on her back, got across the stream and made 
her way to a village where were a party of 
Armenians who had escaped massacre. She ar- 
rived there at midnight, and at first they thought 
she was a ghost. To them she told her story of 
the outraged and ever-dwindling caravan of 
helpless women and girls driven onwards all 
day beneath the smiting arrows of the sun, and 



74 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

encamped by the wayside, where they halted 
with their barbarous guards and their lusts for 
a terror by night. Of them none but this one 
was left, who had carried her baby with her 
every step of that infernal pilgrimage. Two 
days afterwards he died from want of nourish- 
ment, and before the week was out the mother 
fell into the hands of a body of patrolling Kurds, 
and was killed. 

So the problem of the village of Kheiban was 
solved, and if in the history of the crimes that 
have blackened the earth with wanton cruelty 
and made God to hide His face, there is any so 
atrocious a tale, I do not know it. But if among 
the annals of heroism and of mother-love we 
want to find a nobler record than that of this 
woman of Kheiban, equally am I at a loss as to 
where we should look for it. Among the true 
and golden legends of the world shall that which 
she did be inscribed for a memorial of her. 

Northward from Mush and Bitlis lies the 
province of Erzerum, with the town of the same 
name, that contained in the autumn of 1914 some 
20,000 Armenians. Here the first hint of com- 
ing trouble was the order that all Armenian 
soldiers serving in Turkish ranks should be 
disarmed. This was followed in June by an- 
other order that all the inhabitants of the hun- 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 75 

dred villages in the district should leave their 
homes at two hours ' notice. They numbered 
between 10,000 and 15,000 persons. Of these 
a few took refuge with friendly Kurds, but of 
the remainder a few only lived to reach Erzin- 
jan, where they were again deported, and the 
rest were murdered as they marched. In Erze- 
rum itself orders were received by Tahsin Bey, 
the Vali of the town, that all Armenians were 
to be killed without distinction of age or sex. 
He refused to carry this order out, but his un- 
willingness was overruled. 1 Simultaneously 
the German Consul telegraphed protests to his 
Ambassador at Constantinople, and was told 
that Germany could not interfere in the inter- 
nal affairs of Turkey. 

Here the method employed was deportation: 
the victims were murdered, not in the town it- 
self, but were given orders to leave their homes, 
and under guard march (for no conveyances 
were given them) to other districts. The first 
company was to go to Diarbekr. All these, with 
the exception of one man and forty women, were 
murdered on the first day's march. The re- 
mainder reached Kharput, which was another 

*At Angora a similar refusal on the part of the Governor 
resulted in his dismissal, and the same thing happened at Konia 
and at Kutaia. 



76 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

station or collecting place for the deported. A 
German eye-witness tells us what fate waited 
them. ' ' They have had their eyebrows plucked 
out, their breasts cut off, their nails torn off; 
their torturers hew off their feet, or else ham- 
mer nails into them as they do in shoeing 
horses. This is all done at night-time, in order 
that people may not hear their screams and 
know of their agony. Soldiers are stationed 
round the prisons, beating drums and blowing 
whistles. It is needless to relate that many died 
of these tortures. When they die, the soldiers 
cry, ' Now let your Christ help you. ' ' ' A sec- 
ond caravan of five hundred families left Erze- 
rum: at Baiburt they were joined by another 
contingent deported from that town, and the ac- 
count that follows is based on the information 
supplied by the Rev. Robert Stapleton, an 
American minister at Erzerum, and by an Ar- 
menian woman who was among the deported, 
and whose life was spared on her embracing 
Islamism. 

The convoy numbered, when it left Baiburt, 
some 15,000 persons, and it reached Erzinjan| 
in safety. There the massacres had already 
taken place, and the women and children had 
been deported, for they found no Armenians 
there. But the convoy had not yet arrived at 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 77 

its goal, and it started out again moving south 
by east till it came to Kamakh. There bands 
of Kurds descended on them, and in the space 
of seven days every male above fifteen years of 
age, including an aged priest of ninety, was 
killed. Thereafter a pilgrimage of women, as 
from Kheiban, moved southwards across plain 
and mountain, and every day its numbers were 
diminished, for the youthful and the good-look- 
ing were carried off by brigands. At night they 
were halted outside villages, and the gendarmes 
and villagers took what they chose. Many died 
from hunger and heat-stroke: others were left 
by the wayside. When they came to the banks 
of the river Kara-Su there was a debauch of 
horror. Women and girls and little children 
were raped and mutilated, and the children 
who still survived were thrown into the river. 
Those who could swim were shot. There- 
after the movements of this caravan are 
hard to trace. Probably there was then but 
little left of it. But others followed on the same 
route "through fields and hillsides dotted with 
swollen and blackened corpses that filled and 
fouled the air with their stench.' ' Some of 
them reached Mosul, some reached Aleppo, an- 
other collecting station, where, by the mouth of 
other witnesses, we shall hear of them again. 



78 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Corroborative and additional evidence is 
given by the Danish Red Cross nurses who, with 
a noble disregard of their own safety, accom- 
panied one of these caravans from Erzerom to 
Erzinjan. They speak of the massacres at 
Kamakh, of the killing by the river, and of a 
battue through the cornfields, where the wheat 
was high, into which some Armenians had es- 
caped. At one time these Danish Sisters were 
in the charge of a gendarme who had super- 
intended a massacre of 3,000 women and chil- 
dren driven from their homes into the country, 
rounded up and killed. He told the Sisters that 
this was the best method of getting rid of them, 
for they should be made to suffer first, and be- 
sides it would be inconvenient for Moslems to 
live in a village with so many corpses about. 
At another place they came to a shambles, where 
Armenian soldiers, deprived of their arms, and 
sent to make roads, had been slaughtered: at 
another there were three gangs of labourers, 
one Moslem, one Greek, and one Armenian. 
These latter were guarded. Presently, as they 
proceeded along their road, they looked round 
and saw that the Armenian gang was being 
formed up by itself, a little off the high- 
road. . . . 

And so the ghastly record went on all over 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 79 

Armenia. At one place only, the town of Van, 
was any resistance organised. There, after the 
massacre had begun, some 1500 Armenians got 
hold of arms (probably many of these men were 
soldiers who had not yet had their arms taken 
from them), and for the space of twenty-seven 
days defended themselves against five thousand 
Turkish troops, till the Russian advance re- 
lieved them. During that advance Armenian 
refugees, into whose districts the massacres had 
not yet penetrated, fled for refuge to the invad- 
ing army, and in all some 250,000 Armenians 
under its protection crossed in safety the Rus- 
sian frontier into Trans-Caucasia. How many 
died on the way from hunger and exhaustion is 
not known. Cholera, dysentery, and spotted 
fever broke out among them, and the path of 
their passage was lined with dead and dying. 
Companies of Kurds made descents upon them, 
taking toll of their maidenhood, but, with the 
Russian line to protect them at their rear, they 
struggled on out of the cemetery and brothel 
of their native country, and out of the accursed 
confines of that hell on earth, the Ottoman Em- 
pire, leaving behind them the murdered myriads 
of their husbands and their sons, their violated 
wives and daughters. Through incredible hard- 
ships they passed, but, unlike the other pilgrim- 



80 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

ages we have briefly traced, they moved not 
towards death, but towards safety and life, and 
their dark steps were lightened with Hope. 

Before the last of those who survived the 
hunger and the pestilence of that pilgrimage 
had reached Russian soil, it is probable that 
in all Armenia there was not a man of their 
race left alive, nor a woman either unless she 
had accepted Islamism and the life of the harem. 
A peaceful and progressive nation had been 
wiped out with every accompaniment of horror 
and cruelty and bestial lust, and in Armenia it- 
self there would never more be an Armenian 
question. Abdul Hamid had hinted at the solu- 
tion of it, and had made, as we have seen, ex- 
periments in that direction ; but it was reserved 
for Enver Pasha and Talaat Bey, enlightened 
men of the Young Turk party, with the advan- 
tages of a Prussian example, to complete the 
work. Already Enver had said that he would 
never rest until the last Armenian in the Otto- 
man Empire had been killed, and before the end 
of 1915, as far as Armenia itself went, he was 
able to see a reasonable prospect of repose be- 
fore him. But there was much work still left to 
do in other provinces. 

We have seen that for the extirpation of Ar- 
menians in Armenia proper, the excuse put for- 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 81 

ward, if not by the Turks themselves, by their 
German apologists, was the necessity of guard- 
ing against treachery in the vicinity of the 
Turkish army, and against spying and collusion 
between the Armenians behind the Eussian lines 
and those behind Turkish lines. The same pre- 
text was put forward for the massacres and de- 
portations from Thrace, from Constantinople, 
and from the shores of the Sea of Marmora. 
Here, if anywhere, there may be thought to be 
some justification for measures which might 
have been undertaken for the sake of public 
safety. At any rate, there were definite charges 
brought against Armenians in these districts, 
and the Armenian boatmen of Silivri, for in- 
stance, were imprisoned, but not, as far as I 
know, massacred, on the charge of revictualling 
English submarines, which at that time, as the 
reader will remember, had penetrated into the 
Sea of Marmora, and indeed had reached Con- 
stantinople itself. It is not, of course, con- 
sonant with Turkish or Prussian justice to sub- 
stantiate charges before inflicting penalties, it 
is sufficient in the new World-justice to accuse. 
But here round Constantinople, there was some 
pretence at procedure before resorting to mur- 
der and deportation. A register was drawn up 
of all Armenians resident in the capital, divid- 



82 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

ing into separate classes those who were born 
in Constantinople, and those who were immi- 
grants from Armenia, with a view to deporting 
those who were not native to the city. Here, 
I think, we may see traces of the Prnssian in- 
stinct for tabulation, for classification, for 
category-mongering. Enver and his colleagues 
lost patience with these dilatory tactics. The 
Armenians of the province of Brussa were de- 
ported wholesale, and long before the registra- 
tion lists of Constantinople were finished, all 
Armenians were moved out of the town. Ten 
thousand males were massacred in the moun- 
tains of Ismid, and the Armenian women and 
children taken into collecting stations for de- 
portation to "agricultural colonies" (so the 
phrase ran in the Pecksniff language of Prus- 
sia) situated in the Anatolian desert, in the 
desert of Arabia, and in malarious marshes on 
the Euphrates. With this clearing out of Ar- 
menians from Thrace, from Constantinople, and 
from Armenia itself, we have finished with our 
first class of the Armenian atrocities. For it 
reasons were at least invented by German apolo- 
gists. Military necessities, which here, as in 
Belgium, knew no law, dictated it ; the f rightful- 
ness involved was incidental to War. But such 
considerations were not even alleged for the 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 83 



second class of the murder-scheme. Before 
passing on, it will be well to review, quite 
shortly, the reasons which dictated it, and pene- 
trate into the infernal councils of Enver Pasha 
and Talaat Bey. 

The text of the scheme is to be found in the 
defined policy of the Young Turk party as set 
forth in their Congress of 1911. ' ' Turkey must 
become a really Mohammedan country, and 
Moslem ideas and Moslem influence must be 
preponderant. . . . Sooner or later the com- 
plete Ottomanisation of all Turkish subjects 
must be effected : it is clear, however, that this 
can never be attained by persuasion, but that 
we must resort to armed force. ' ' 

There is the text that was expanded into the 
discourse of murder; it is the definition of a 
policy. Within a few years there followed the 
European War, and that probably was the im- 
mediate cause of its being put into effect. No 
more admirable opportunity for Ottomanisation 
could present itself, for the entry of Turkey into 
the war was most unpopular with the bulk of 
the Turkish population, and it was advisable to 
bribe them into acceptance of it. The bribe was 
the houses, the property, the money and the 
trade that throughout the length and breadth 
of Turkey was in Armenian hands. For the 



84 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Armenians were by far the wealthiest of the 
alien populations, and some 90 per cent, of 
Turkish trade passed through their shops and 
offices. Here, then, was the psychological mo- 
4. ment : Turkey for the Turk was the aim of the 
Committee of Union and Progress, and with a 
discontented population, unwilling to fight, the 
moment had come for restoring to the Turk 
this mass of property which at present be- 
longed to an alien race. War might have its 
drawbacks and its clouds, but war would be 
seen to have its advantages and its silver lin- 
ings, if out of it there came this legacy of Ar- 
menian wealth. And by the same stroke Turkey 
could get rid of those thousands of meddlesome 
missionaries, American and French, who spread 
religion and learning and other undesirable 
things among the cursed race. Once remove the 
cursed race, and there would be an end of their 
instructors also, for there would be none to 
instruct. ' ' Thanks to their schools, M so we read 
in the Hilal, an organ of the Young Turks, 
"foreigners were able to exercise great moral 
influence over the young men of the country. 
... By closing them (i.e. by exterminating 
their pupils) the Government has put an end to 
a situation as humiliating as it was dangerous." 
Such, then, was the spirit that animated En- 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 85 



ver and Talaat, and during the winter of 1914-15 
they perfected their plans. The Armenian race 
was to cease, and the Valis and other officials 
were, each in his district, to see to the thor- 
oughness of its cessation. Sometimes, as hap- 
pened at Erzerum, the Vali in question, not 
having the broad outlook of Enver, or quaintly 
and curiously having a womanish objection to 
the national duty of flogging men to death and 
giving over young girls to a barbarous soldiery, 
remonstrated with the authorities, or even re- 
fused to obey orders. Such a one was instantly 
removed from his office, and a stauncher patriot 
substituted. All was put on an orderly footing : 
here Kurds were to be employed on the old Ab- 
dul Hamid formula, who by way of wage would 
enjoy the privilege of raping as many women 
and girls out of their hapless convoy as seemed 
desirable, while in agricultural districts they 
were allowed also to take over the sheep and 
cattle of their murdered victims. Here, in 
towns where there was more chance of resist- 
ance than in scattered homesteads, it would be 
wise to employ regular troops, backed, if neces- 
sary, by artillery, to whom would be entrusted 
the murder of the whole male population, after 
suitable tortures, supposing the executioners 
had a taste for the sport, and to them was given 



86 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

the right of general plunder. Then, as soon as 
the number and capacity of the vacant houses 
were telegraphed to Constantinople, occupiers 
from the discontented townsfolk and natives of 
Thrace were assigned to them. Sometimes 
there would be a big school building to give 
away as well, but that was not always so, for it 
might be more convenient to assemble Ar- 
menians there for purposes of registration or 
so forth, and then, if it happened to catch fire, 
why Enver would understand that such acci- 
dents would occur. Among other careful and 
well-thought-out instructions came the order 
that, when possible, the murders should not take 
place in the town, but outside it, for clean 
Allah-fearing Moslems would not like to live in 
habitations defiled by Christian corpses. But, 
above all, there must be thoroughness; not a 
man must be left alive, not a girl nor a woman 
who must not drag her outraged body, so long 
as breath and the heart-beat remained in it, to, 
or rather towards those " agricultural colonies," 
as Talaat Bey, in a flash of whimsical Prussian 
humour, called them. One was advantageously 
situated in the middle of the Anatolian desert 
at the village of Sultanieh. There, for miles 
round, stretched the rocks and sands of a water- 
less wilderness, but no doubt the women and 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 87 

children of this very industrious race would 
manage to make it wave with cornfields. An- 
other agricultural colony, by way of contrast, 
should be established a couple of days' journey 
south of Aleppo, where the river loses itself in 
pestilential and malarious swamps. Arabs 
could not live there, but who knew whether 
those hardy Armenians (the women and chil- 
dren of them at least who had proved them- 
selves robust enough to reach the place) would 
not flourish there out of harm's way? After 
the swamps one came to the Arabian desert, 
and there, a hundred miles south-east, was a 
place called Deir-el-Zor ; wandering Arab tribes 
sometimes passed through it, but, arrived there, 
the Armenians should wander no more. In 
those arid sands and waterless furnaces of bar- 
ren rock there was room for all and to spare. 
Sultanieh, the swamps, and Deir-el-Zor: these 
were the chief of Talaat Bey's agricultural 
colonies. 

There must be collecting stations for these 
tragic colonists, centres to which they must be 
herded in from surrounding districts: one at 
Osmanieh, let us say, one at Aleppo, one at 
Eas-el-Ain, one at Damascus. And since it 
would be a pity to let so many flowers of girl- 
hood waste their sweetness on the desert air of 



88 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Deir-el-Zor, slave markets must be established 
at these collecting stations. There would be 
plenty of girls, and prices would be low, but 
the reverend ministers of Allah the God of 
Love, the Ulemas, the Padis and the Muftis, 
should be accorded a preferential tariff. In- 
deed they should pay nothing at all ; they should 
just choose a girl and take her away, and, with 
the help of Allah the God of Love, convert ker 
to the blessed creed. No one was too young 
for these lessons. ... A little abstemiousness 
would not hurt these pampered Christians, so 
when they set out on their marches they need 
not be provided with rations or water. Per- 
haps some might die, but Talaat had no use for 
weaklings at his agricultural colonies. Nor 
must there be any poking and prying on the 
part of those interfering American mission- 
aries; and so Talaat Bey put all the agricul- 
tural colonies out of bounds for foreigners. . . . 
There was no hurry over these deportations, 
for the plea of military exigencies, which had 
caused the deportations in Armenia itself to be 
terminated by massacre with a rapidity almost 
inartistic, did not apply to Armenians so far 
from the seat of war. Their picnics could be 
conducted quietly and pleasantly in the leisurely 
Oriental manner. Even the men need not be 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 89 

murdered absolutely out of hand. Strong young 
fellows might be stripped and tied down and 
then beaten to death by bastinadoing the feet 
till they burst, or by five hundred blows on the 
chest and stomach. Their cries would mingle 
with the screams of their sisters in the embrace 
of Turkish soldiers. And, talking of embraces, 
if a woman was desirable, she need not walk all 
the way to Deir-el-Zor, but by embracing Islam- 
ism be transferred to a harem. But these were 
details that might be left to individual taste: 
there were no precise instructions save that no 
Armenian men must be discoverable in the 
Ottoman Empire at all, and no women save 
those who had become Turkish women, or who 
were at work on the waterless and the malarial 
agricultural colonies. 

Talaat Bey reviewed his finished scheme. He 
thought it would do, and Enver Pasha agreed 
with him, and Jemal Bey (who soon after 
styled himself Jemal the Great), the Military 
Governor of Syria, and so responsible for the 
last stages of their pilgrimage, thought it would 
do very well indeed. And instructions were 
sent out to every town in the Empire where 
there were Armenians, in accordance with the 
programme of Talaat Bey. 

How Enver carried out his part of the pro- 



90 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

1 

gramme in Armenia itself we have seen, and by 
the end of the year (1915) his work was done, 
and Armenia was Armenia no longer. But op- 
erations, as I have said, were conducted in a 
more leisurely manner elsewhere, and the agony 
of that butchery protracted. But Jemal got to 
work at once in the thickly populated district 
round Zeitun. He had had no success in the 
campaign of the winter in the direction of the 
Suez Canal, and his troops were hungry for 
some sort of victory. The Zeitunlis were hardy 
independent mountaineers, who were possessed 
of arms, and Jemal thought it more prudent not 
to dally with deportations, but conduct a reg- 
ular campaign against them. For two or three 
months they resisted, entrenching themselves in 
the hills, but they could not hold out against 
artillery and the modern apparatus of war, and 
the whole tribe was wiped out. That done, 
Jemal became Jemal the Great by reason of his 
national services, and paid a visit to Germany. 
On his return we shall hear of him again. 

Meanwhile, from all the reports that have 
arrived from missionaries and others, we may 
take one or two, almost at random. At certain 
places, as in the governments of Ismid, Angora 
and Diarbekr, the Armenian population was 
completely wiped out. Sometimes tortures were 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 91 

added, as at a certain Anatolian town where 
there was a big Armenian school, in which a 
number of professors and instructors, some of 
whom had studied in America, in Scotland, and 
in Germany, had for years been working. 
What happened to them was this : — 

(1) Professor A. served the College thirty- 
five years, and taught Turkish and history. He 
was arrested without charge, the hair of his 
head and beard were pulled out in order to se- 
cure damaging confessions. He was starved 
and hung up by the arms for a day and a night 
and repeatedly beaten. He was then murdered. 

(2) Professor B., who had served the College 
thirty-three years, and taught mathematics, 
suffered the same fate. 

(3) Professor C, head of the preparatory 
department, had served the College for twenty 
years. He was made to witness the spectacle 
of a man being beaten almost to death, and be- 
came mentally deranged. He was murdered 
with his family. 

(4) Professor D., who taught mental and 
moral sciences, was treated in the same way as 
Professor A. He also had three finger nails 
pulled out by the roots, and was subsequently 
murdered. 

Similarly, at Diarbekr, the Armenians were 



92 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

collected in batches of 600, taken out of the 
town, and killed to the last man. Among them 
was the Armenian Archbishop; his eyes and 
nails were dragged out before he was butchered. 

Or let us take a look at some of the collecting 
camps. At one, described by an eye-witness, 
we find that the convoy had arrived after sev- 
eral months of travel. More than half were 
already dead, they had been pillaged by bandits 
and Kurds seven times. They were forbidden 
to drink water when they passed by a stream, 
three-quarters of the young women and girls 
had been kidnapped, the rest were compelled to 
sleep with the gendarmes who conducted them. 
At Osmanieh it was decided to deport the 
women and children by train. They lay about 
the station starving and fever-stricken. When 
the train arrived many were jostled on to the 
line, and the driver yelled with joy, crying out, 
' l Did you see how I smashed them up 1 ' ' 

At another camp typhus broke out ; those who 
died of it were left unburied, as vouched for by 
a Turkish officer, in order to increase the infec- 
tion. . . . 

Urf a was another collecting camp for the Ar- 
menians in that district, and the following ac- 
count is based on the information of an eye- 
witness. Here, before the concentration began, 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 93 

the Armenians living in the town offered re- 
sistance to the Turks, and held out until Fahri 
Bey, second in command to Jemal the Great, 
arrived with artillery, bombarded the town, and 
massacred every Armenian there. Quiet being 
thus restored, the bands of deported began to 
arrive. They came by rail or on foot, and, with 
the Prussian love of tabulation, were divided 
into three groups. 

The first group consisted of old men, old 
women, and young children. They, guarded by 
gendarmes, were sent marching through the 
desert to Deir-el-Zor. Few, if any, ever arrived 
there, all dying by the way. 

The second group, consisting of able-bodied 
men, was led off in batches and slaughtered. 
Among them were Zohrab and Vartkes, Ar- 
menian deputies, who had been brought there 
from Constantinople. 

The third group consisted of young marriage- 
able girls. Some, perhaps, found their way into 
harems. 

From Aleppo (one of the final concentration 
camps before such as were left of the convoys 
set forth for their goal, the swamps or the 
desert round Deir-el-Zor) we have the detailed 
evidence of Dr. Martin Niepage, High Grade 
teacher in the German Technical School. This 



94 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

gentleman, with a courage and a humanity to 
which the highest tribute must be paid, ad- 
dressed a report of protest to the German Am- 
bassador at Constantinople, and wrote an open 
letter to the Reichstag on the subject of what 
he had seen with his own eyes in that town. In 
his preliminary matter he speaks as follows : — * 

"In dilapidated caravanserais I found quan- 
tities of dead, many corpses being half -decom- 
posed, and others still living among them who 
were soon to breathe their last. In other yards 
I found quantities of sick and dying people, 
whom nobody was looking after. . . . We teach- 
ers and our pupils had to pass them every day. 
Every time we went out we saw through the 
open windows their pitiful forms, emaciated and 
wrapped in rags. In the morning our school 
children, on their way through the narrow 
streets, had to push past the two-wheeled ox- 
carts on which every day, from eight to ten 
rigid corpses without coffin or shroud, were 
carried away, their arms and legs trailing out 
of the vehicle.' ' 

From the report itself : — 

"Out of convoys which, when they left their 
homes on the Armenian plateau, numbered from 
two to three thousand men, women, and chil- 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 95 

dren, only two or three hundred survivors ar- 
rived here in the south. The men were slaugh- 
tered on the way, the women and girls, with the 
exception of the old, the ugly and those who 
are still children, have been abused by Turkish 
soldiers and officers. . . . Even when they are 
fording rivers they do not allow those dying of 
thirst to drink. All the nourishment they re- 
ceive is a daily ration of a little meal sprinkled 
on their hands. . . . Opposite the German Tech- 
nical School at Aleppo, a mass of about four 
hundred emaciated forms, the remnant of such 
convoys, is lying in one of the caravanserais. 
There are about a hundred children (boys and 
girls) among them, from five to seven years old. 
Most of them are suffering from typhoid and 
dysentery. When one enters the yard, one has 
the impression of entering a madhouse. If one 
brings food, one notices that they have forgotten 
how to eat. ... If one gives them bread, they 
put it aside indifferently. They just lie there 
quietly waiting for death.' ' 

Dr. Niepage wrote this report in the hope of 
saving such as then (1915) survived. No notice 
whatever was taken of it, and his postscript, 
written in May 1916, records the fact that "the 
exiles encamped at Eas-el-Ain on the Bagdad 



96 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Railway, estimated at 20,000 men, women and 
children, were slaughtered to the last one." 1 

In Dr. Niepage's view, as I have stated else- 
where, the Germans are directly responsible for 
the continuance of the massacres. Such, too, is 
the opinion, he tells us, of the educated Moslems, 
and his courage in stating this has lost him his 
post at Aleppo. It is to be sincerely hoped that 
he has escaped the fate of a certain Dr. Lepsius, 
who, for drawing attention to the fact that Ger- 
many allowed the Armenian massacres, has been 
arrested for high treason. 

Before the end of 1915 the German authorl 
ties, who had refused to interfere in the mas> 
sacres, and both in the official press and through 
official utterances had expressed their support 
of this Ottomanisation of the Empire, began to 
think that you might have too much of a good 
thing, and that the massacres had really gone 
far enough. Their reason was clear and ex- 
plicit: there would be a very serious shortage 

x It is right to add that at Aleppo an officer called Bekir 
Sami guarded 50,000 Armenians whom he had collected from 
neighbouring districts, who were threatened with massacre, and 
I find that a German missionary states that there were 45,000 
Armenians alive in Aleppo. This forms confirmatory evidence, 
but at the same time there is nothing to show that they were 
not subsequently deported to Deir-el-Zor. In this case it is 
highly improbable that any survive. 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 97 

^ ^ ^— — —^ — — — — — — ■■■»; — — — 

l - " ' ~ ' 

of labour in the beet-growing industry and in 
the harvest-fields, for which they had sent grain 
and artificial manures from Germany. There 
had been some talk, they said, of saving 500,000 
Armenians out of the race, but, in the way 
things were going on, it seemed that the rem- 
nant would not nearly approach that figure. 
Would not the great Ottomanisers temper their 
patriotism with a little clemency? Talaat Bey 
disagreed: he wanted to make a complete job 
of it, but Jemal the Great, fresh from his visit 
to Germany, supported the idea, and, in spite 
of Talaat 's opposition, made a spectacular ex- 
hibition of clemency, in which, beyond doubt, 
we can trace an i ' Imitatio Imperatoris, ' ' in the 
following manner. 

There was at the time a large convoy of men 
and women in Constantinople which was to be 
led out for murder and deportation, and Jemal 
gave orders that it should be spared and sent 
back to its highland home. He gave orders also 
that the entire convoy should be informed who 
was their saviour, and should be led in proces- 
sion past his house and show their gratitude. 
All day the sorry pageant lasted, the ragged, 
half-starved crowd streamed by the house of 
Jemal the Great, with murmurs of thanksgiving 
and uplifted hands, and all manner of obei- 



98 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

sances, while Jemal the Great stood in his porch 
with stern, impassive face, and hand on his 
sword-hilt in the best Potsdam manner, and 
acknowledged these thanksgivings. . . . 1 

Here, then, is the absurd, the Williamesque 
side of this ludicrous popinjay, Jemal the Great, 
and it contains not only the obvious seeds of 
laughter, but the more helpful seeds of hope. 
He has a strong hand on the very efficient army 
of Syria, and his visits to Berlin seem perhaps 
to have turned his head not quite in the direc- 
tion that the Master-egalo-megalomaniacof Ber- 
lin intended. I gather that Jemal the Great was 
not so much impressed by the magnificence of 
William n. as to fall dazzled and prone at the 
Imperial feet, and lick with enraptured tongue 
the imperial boot polish, but rather to be in- 
spired to do the same himself, to become the 
God-anointed of the newly acquired German 
province, which is Turkey, and make a Potsdam 
of his own. This is only a guess, but the con- 
duct of Jemal the Great in the matter of these 
Armenian refugees, and in other affairs, has 
been distinctly imperial. In June of this year, 

1 In support of Jemal 's claim to clemency it must be added 
that, according to a report coming from Alexandria, he hanged 
twelve of the worst assassins sent to Syria as ringleaders of 
the massacres. I cannot find corroboration of this. 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 99 



for instance, he telegraphed to H. E. the Vali 
of Syria, and an extract from his text is truly 
Potsdamish. "One and a half million of sand- 
bags/ ' he wrote, "are required for the fortress 
of Gaza. . . . The bags should be made, if nec- 
essary, of all the silk-hangings in houses of 
Syria and Palestine." With his army behind 
him, he has twice already defied the orders of 
Talaat, and I am inclined to think that he is the 
coming Strong Man of the effete Empire with 
whom it would be well worth while to make 
friends, even at a highish price. The Allied 
Powers should keep an undazzled eye on him, 
for it is quite possible that, having defied Talaat 
successfully, he may go on to defy the real 
rulers of Turkey, who live in Berlin. His 
Syrian army, from such sources as are avail- 
able, appears to be more efficient than any other 
body of troops the Turks can put into the field, 
and he has them in control. Probably in the 
winter of 1917-1918 our troops will come into 
collision with them. But in the interval, also 
quite probably, Jemal the Great may resent 
German superintendence. 1 

But in addition to his ludicrous side, there is 
in him a refined hypocrisy and a subtle cruelty 

x See note at end of this chapter. 



100 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

worthy of Abdul Hamid. One instance will 
suffice. 

There had been some talk that at certain of 
these concentration camps there was no water 
supply, and he gave orders, did Jemal the 
Great and the Merciful, that water should be 
sent. A train consisting of trucks of water ac- 
cordingly was despatched to one of those camps, 
situated in the desert, with no supply nearer 
than six miles, and an eye-witness describes its 
arrival. The mob of Armenians, mad with 
thirst, surrounded it, and, since everything must 
be done in an orderly and seemly manner, were 
beaten back by the Turkish guards, and made to 
stand at a due distance for the distribution. 
And when those ranks, with their parched 
throats and sun-cracked lips, were all ready, the 
Turkish guards opened the taps of the reser- 
voirs, and allowed the whole of their contents 
to run away into the sand. Whether Jemal the 
Great planned that, or whether it was but a 
humorous freak on the part of the officials, I 
cannot say. But as a refinement of cruelty I 
bave, outside the page of Poe 's tales, only once 
come across anything to equal it, and that in a 
letter from the Times' correspondent at Berne 
on April 11, 1917. He describes the treatment 
of English prisoners in Germany : ' ' An equally 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 101 

common entertainment with those women (Ger- 
man Red Cross nurses) was to offer a wounded 
man a glass, perhaps, of water, then, standing 
just outside his reach, to pour it slowly on the 
ground.' ' Could those sisters of mercy have 
read the account of Jemal 's clemency, or is it 
merely an instance of the parallelism of similar 
minds f 

So the empty train returned, and Jemal the 
Great caused it to be known in Berlin that he 
was active in securing a proper water supply 
for the famous agricultural settlements in the 
desert, and loud were the encomiums in the 
press of the Central Powers over the colonisa- 
tion of Syria by the Armenians, the progress 
and enlightenment of the Turks, and the skilful 
and humane organisation of Jemal the Great. 

There is no difficulty in estimating to-day the 
number of Armenian men who survive in the 
Turkish Empire. All appeals to the Prussian 
overlords, such as were made by Dr. Niepage, 
and the belated remonstrance of the Prussians 
themselves when they foresaw a dearth of la- 
bour for the husbandry of beets and cereals, fell 
on deaf ears, and I cannot see any reason for 
supposing that Armenian men exist any more 
in the Empire. It is more difficult to judge of 
the numbers of women who, by accepting the 



102 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

ii —si 

Moslem creed and the harems, are still alive. 
Certainly in some districts there were consider- 
able "conversions," and Dr. Niepage rates them 
as many thousands. But the willingness to ac- 
cept those conditions was not always a guar- 
antee for their being granted, and I have read 
reports where would-be converts were told that 
"religion" was a more serious matter than that, 
and, instead of being accepted, they were mas- 
sacred. But even if Dr. Niepage is right, we 
can scarcely consider these women as constitut- 
ing an Armenian element any more in the coun- 
try. The work of butchery, the torture, the 
long-drawn agonies of those inhuman pilgrim- 
ages have come to an end because there are no 
more Armenian victims available. Apart from 
those who escaped over the Russian frontier, 
and the handful who sought refuge in Egypt, 
the race exists no longer, and the seal has been 
set on the bloodiest deed that ever stained the 
annals of the barbarous Osmanlis. It is not in 
revenge on the murderers, but in order to res- 
cue the other subject peoples, Arabs, Greeks, 
Jews, who are still enclosed within the frontiers 
of the Empire, that the Allied Governments, in 
their answer to President Wilson, stated that 
among their aims as belligerents, was the "lib- 
eration of the peoples who now lie beneath the 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 103 



murderous tyranny of the Turks." There is 
denned their irreducible demand: never again, 
after peace returns, will the Turk be allowed to 
control the destinies of races not his own. Too 
long already — and to their disgrace be it spoken 
— have the civilised and Christian nations of 
Europe tolerated at their very doors a tyranny 
that has steadily grown more murderous and 
more monstrous, because they feared the upset 
of the Balance of Power. Now at least such 
Powers as value national honour, and regard a 
national promise as something more than a 
gabble of ink on a scrap of paper, have resolved 
that they will suffer the tyranny of the Turk 
over his alien subject peoples to continue no 
longer. It is the least they can do (and un- 
happily the most) to redeem the century-long 
neglect of their duty. Even now, as we shall 
see in a subsequent chapter, the direst peril 
threatens those other peoples who at present 
groan under Turkish rule, and we can but pray 
that the end of the war will come before Arabs 
or Greeks or Jews suffer the same fate as has 
exterminated the Armenians. Too often have 
we been too late ; we must only hope that an- 
other item will not have to be added to that 
miserable list, and that, when the day of reckon- 
ing comes, no half-hearted and pusillanimous 



104 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

policy will stay our hands from the complete 
execution of that to which we stand pledged. 
The Balance of Power has gone the way of 
other rickety makeshifts, but there must be no 
makeshift in our dealings with the Turk, no 
compromise and no delay. What shall be done 
with those who planned and executed the great- 
est massacres known to history matters little; 
let them be hanged as high as Haman, and have 
done with them. But what does matter is that 
at no future time must it be in the power of a 
Government that has never been other than bar- 
baric and butcherous, to do again as it has done 
before. 

Note on Jemal the Great 

Jemal the Great has very obligingly done what I 
suggested we might expect him to do, and has kicked 
against the German control of the Syrian army. Gen- 
eral von Falkenhayn was sent to take supreme com- 
mand, and on June 28th of this year Jemal the Great 
refused to receive orders from him. In consequence 
General von Falkenhayn refused responsibility for 
any offensive movement there if Jemal remained in 
command. 

This promised well for trouble between Turks and 
Germans, but we must not, I am afraid, build very 
high hopes on it, for Germany has dealt with the situ- 
ation in a masterly manner. Jemal was already Min- 
ister of Marine as well as commander of the Syrian 
army, so the Emperor asked him to pay another visit 



END OF THE ARMENIAN QUESTION 105 

to Berlin, and lie has been visiting Krupp 's works and 
German naval yards, and we shall find probably that 
in the future his activities will be marine rather than 
military, and that von Falkenhayn will have a free 
hand in Syria. 

But this will prove rather disappointing for Jemal, 
since it seems beyond mere coincidence that towards 
the end of August Herr von Kuhlmann, the new Ger- 
man Foreign Minister, induced the Turkish Govern- 
ment (while Jemal was at Berlin) to put their navy 
and their merchant fleet under the orders of the Ger- 
man Admiralty, and already many Turkish naval 
officers have been replaced by Germans. Thus Jemal 
will find himself deprived of his military command, 
because the navy so urgently needed his guiding hand, 
while his guiding hand over the navy will be itself 
guided by the German Admiralty. ... In fact, it 
looks rather like checkmate for Jemal the Great, and 
an end to the trouble he might have given the Ger- 
man control. 

On the eve of his leaving Germany, as yet uncon- 
scious probably of the subordination of the entire 
Turkish fleet to the German Admiralty, he gave an in- 
terview to a representative of the Cologne Gazette, 
which deserves more than that ephemeral appearance. 
It shows Jemal the Great in a sort of hypnotic trance 
induced at Potsdam. "The German fleet," he says, 
"is simply spotless in its power, and a model for all 
states which need a modern navy — a model which can- 
not be surpassed. ' ' . . . He went for a cruise in a sub- 
marine which proceeded "so smoothly, elegantly, 
calmly and securely that I had the impression of 
cruising in a great steamship. " ... He was taken to 
Belgium, and describes the "idyllic life there": in the 
towns ' ' the people go for walks all day long, ' ' and in 
the country the peasants blithely gather in the harvest 



106 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

with the help of happy prisoners. ' ' (He does not tell 
us where the harvest goes to, any more than the Ger- 
mans tell us where the Turkish harvests go to.) He 
was taken to General Headquarters, which he describes 
as "majestic. ' ' Finally he was taken into the presence 
of the All-Highest, and seems to have emerged in the 
condition in which Moses came down from Sinai. . . . 
But one must not altogether despair of Jemal the 
Great. It is still possible that, on his return to Con- 
stantinople, when he found that his position as Minis- 
ter of Marine was but a clerkship in the German 
Admiralty, the hypnotic trance began to pass off, and 
his ambitions to re-assert themselves. He may yet 
give trouble to the Germans if properly handled. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Question of Syeia and Palestine 

It is impossible to leave this heart-rending tale 
of the sufferings of the Armenian people nnder 
the Turks without some account of that devoted 
band of American missionaries who, with a 
heroism unsurpassed, and perhaps unequalled, 
so eagerly sacrificed themselves to the ravages 
of pestilence and starvation in order to alleviate 
the horrors that descended on the people to 
whom they had been sent. Often they were 
forcibly driven from the care of their flocks, 
often in the extermination of their flocks there 
was none left whom they could shepherd, but 
wherever a remnant still lingered there re- 
mained these dauntless and self-sacrificing men 
and women, regardless of everything except the 
cause to which they had devoted themselves. 
They recked nothing of the dangers to which 
they exposed themselves so long as there was 
a child or a woman or a man whom they could 
feed or nurse. Terrible as were the sufferings 
through which the Armenians passed, they must 

107 



108 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

have been infinitely more unbearable had it not 
been for these American missionaries ; small as 
was the remnant that escaped into the safety of 
Persia or Russian Trans-Caucasia, their num- 
bers must have been halved had it not been for 
the heroism of these men and women. While 
the German Consuls contented themselves with 
a few faint protests to their Ambassador at 
Constantinople, followed by an acquiescence of 
silence, the missionaries constituted themselves 
into a Red Cross Society of intrepid workers, 
and, as one well-qualified authority tells us, 
"suffered as many casualties from typhus and 
physical exhaustion as any proportionate body 
of workers on the European battlefields. ' ' 
Fully indeed did they live up to the mandate of 
the American board that sent them out : "Your 
great business is with the fundamental doctrines 
and duties of the Gospel." 

At the opening of the European War the 
American Missions had been at work for nearly 
a hundred years, and were disseminated over 
Anatolia and Armenia. They had opened 163 
Protestant churches and 450 schools, they estab- 
lished hospitals, and in every possible way 
spread civilisation in a country where the spirit 
of the governing class was barbarism. It was 
not their object to proselytise. "Let the Ar- 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 109 

menian remain an Armenian if he will, ' ' so ran 
the instructions from which I have already- 
quoted, "the Greek a Greek, the Nestorian a 
Nestorian, the Oriental an Oriental, ' ' and in the 
same wise and open-minded spirit they encour- 
aged native Protestant Churches which were 
independent of them and largely self-support- 
ing. Naturally in a country governed by mon- 
sters like Abdul Hamid and Enver Pasha in 
later days, they earned the enmity which is the 
tribute of barbarians to those who stand for 
civilisation, and when, owing to the extermina- 
tion or flight of their Armenian flocks, they were 
left without a charge, and their schools were 
closed, we find a paean of self -congratulation go- 
ing up from the Turkish press inspired by the 
butchers of Armenia. But till the massacres 
and the flight were complete, they gave them- 
selves to the ' ' duties of the Gospel, ' ' and their 
deeds shine like a star into the blackness of that 
night of murder. 

I will take as an example of the superb hero- 
ism of those men and women the diary of an 
American lady attached to the mission at Ur- 
mia, a document that, anonymously, is one of 
the noblest, least self-conscious records I have 
ever read. The period of it extends over five 
months. 



110 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

*— — ■— P— I II MIMIIMI ■ IIWI^— — M«^^— — ^—— — — 1 

Early in January 1915 the Russian troops 
were withdrawn from Urmia, which lies on the 
frontier between Turkey and Persia, and simul- 
taneously the Moslem population began to plun- 
der the Christian villages, the inhabitants of 
which fled for refuge to the missions in the city. 
Talaat's official murder-scheme was not com- 
pleted yet, but the Kurds, together with the 
Turks, had planned a local massacre at Geog- 
tapa, which was stopped by the American doc- 
tor of this mission, Dr. Packard, who, at great 
personal risk, obtained an interview with the 
Kurdish chief, and succeeded in inducing him to 
spare the lives of the Christians, if they gave 
up arms and ammunition and property. The 
American flag was hoisted over the Mission 
buildings, and before a week was out there were 
over ten thousand refugees housed in the yards 
and rooms, where they remained for five months, 
the places of the dead being taken by fresh in- 
fluxes. The dining-room, the sitting-room, the 
church, the school, were all given over to these 
destitute people, and from the beginning fear 
of massacre, as well as prevalence of disease, 
haunted the camp. It was impossible to move 
dead bodies outside; they had to be buried in 
the thronged yards, and every day children were 
born. But here is the spirit that animated their 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 111 

protectors. "We have just had a Praise meet- 
ing, ' ' records the diarist at the close of the first 
fortnight, "with fifty or sixty we could gather 
from the halls and rooms near, and we feel more 
cheerful. We thought if Paul and Silas, with 
their stripes, could sing praises in prison, so 
could we." 

The weeks, of which each day was a proces- 
sion of hours too full of work to leave time for 
anxiety, began to enrol themselves into months, 
and the hope of rescue by a Eussian advance 
made their hearts sick, so long was it deferred. 
Eefugees from neighbouring villages kept arriv- 
ing, and there was the constant problem before 
these devoted friends of their flock, as to how 
to feed them. All such were welcome, and eager 
was the welcome they received, though every 
foot of space in the buildings and in the yards 
was occupied. But somehow they managed to 
make room for all who came, and for those vil- 
lagers who, under threat of torture and mas- 
sacre, had apostatised, there was but yearning 
and sorrow, but never a word of blame or bitter- 
ness. Sometimes there was a visit of Turkish 
troops to search for concealed Eussians, and, as 
our diarist remarks, "We can't complain of the 
monotony of life, for we never know what is 
going to happen next. On Tuesday morning we 



112 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

had a wedding in my room here. The boy and 
girl were simple villagers. . . . The wedding 
was fixed for the Syrian New Year, but the 
Kurds came and carried off wedding clothes 
and everything else in the house. They all fled 
here, and were married in the old dirty gar- 
ments they were wearing when they ran for 
their lives. . . . Their only present was a little 
tea and sugar that I tied up in a handkerchief 
and gave to the bride." 

The eternal feminine and the eternal human 
speak there; and there, for this gallantest of 
women, were two keys that locked up the end- 
less troubles and anxieties that ceased not day 
or night. But sometimes the flesh was weak, 
and in the privacy of her diary she says, ' ' How 
long, Lord?" But for that there was the 
master-key that unlocks all wards, and a little 
further on we read, "One of the verses that 
helps to keep my faith steady is, 'He that 
spared not His own Son.' For weeks we have 
had no word from the outside world, but we 
i rest in Jehovah and wait patiently for Him. ' ' ' 

The conditions inside the crowded yards grew 
steadily worse. Dysentery was rife, and the 
deaths from it in that narrow space averaged 
thirty a day. The state of the sufferers grew 
so terrible that it was difficult to get any one 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 113 

to look after them at all, and many were lying 
in the open yards, and the weather, which hith- 
erto had been warm, got cold, and snow fell. 
It was with the greatest difficulty that food 
could be obtained for those in health, and that 
of a kind utterly unsuitable to the sick, while 
in the minds of their nurses was the bitter 
knowledge that with proper diet hundreds of 
lives could have been saved, and hundreds of 
cases of illness avoided. 

For the dead there was but a small percentage 
of coffins available, and "the great mass are 
just dropped into the great trench of rotting 
humanity (in the yard). As I stand at my win- 
dow I see one after another of the little bodies 
carried by . . . and the condition of the living 
is more pitiful than that of the dead — hungry, 
ragged, dirty, sick, cold, wet, swarming with 
vermin. Not for all the wealth of all the rulers 
of Europe would I bear for one hour their re- 
sponsibility for the suffering and misery of this 
one little corner of the world alone. A helpless 
unarmed Christian CQmmunity turned over to 
the sword and the passion of Islam !" 

On the top of this came an epidemic of ty- 
phoid, twenty-seven cases on the first day. Out- 
side in the town the Turkish Consul began hang- 
ing Christians, and the missioners were allowed 



114 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

to take the bodies and bury them. There were 
threats that the mission would be entered, and 
all young men (possible combatants) killed, but 
this fear was not realised. The typhoid in- 
creased, and the doctor of the mission and 
others of the staff fell ill with it; but the pa- 
tience and service of the remainder never fal- 
tered, while the same spirit of uncomplaining 
suffering animated the refugees. ' ' Mr. M 'Dow- 
ell/ ' so the diarist relates, "saw a tired and 
weary woman with a baby in her arms, sitting 
in one of the seats, and said to her, 'Where do 
you stay?' She said 'Just here.' 'How long 
have you been here?' 'Since the beginning ' 
(two months) she replied. 'How do you sleep 
at night V 'I lay the baby on the desk in front 
of me, and I have this post at the back to lean 
against. This is a very good place. Thank you 
very much. ' ' ' 

In April there comes a break in the diary 
after the day on which the following entry is 
made : — 

"I felt on Sunday as if I ought to get my own 
burial clothes ready, so as to make as little 
trouble as possible when my time comes, for in 
these days we all go about our work knowing 
that any one of us may be the next to go down. 
And yet I think our friends would be surprised 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 115 

to see how cheerful we have kept, and how many 
occasions we find for laughing: for ludicrous 
things do happen. Then, too, after dwelling so 
intimately with Death for three months, he 
doesn't seem to have so unfriendly an aspect, 
and the ' Other Side' seems near, and our Pilot 
close beside us. ... I find the Bock on which 
I can anchor in peace are the words of Christ 
Himself: ' Where I am, there ye may be also.' 
. . . That is enough, to be where He is. . . ." 

Then comes a break of two months, during 
which the writer was down with typhoid. She 
resumes again in June, finding that death has 
made many changes, and gets back to work 
again at once By that time the Eussians had 
entered Urmia, a thanksgiving service was held, 
the refugees dispersed, and the American Mis- 
sion went quietly on with its normal work. 

Now I have taken this one instance of the 
work of Americans at Urmia to show in some 
detail the character of the work that they were 
doing, and the Christian and humanising influ- 
ence of it. But all over Armenia and Anatolia 
were similar settlements, and, as already men- 
tioned, at the time of the massacres there were 
established there over a hundred of their 
ehurches and over four hundred schools, and 
from these extracts which concern only one not 



116 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 



very large centre, it may be gathered what 
leaven of civilising influence the sum of their 
energies must have implied. That lamp shone 
steady and clear, a "kindly light' ' in the dark- 
ness of Turkish misrule, and in the havoc of 
the massacres a beacon of hope, not always 
reached by those hapless refugees. Indeed it 
seems to have been only on the frontier that the 
missions were able to save those foredoomed 
hordes of fleeing Christians; in Armenia and 
in Anatolia generally the massacres and " de- 
portations' ' were complete, and by the end of 
1915 all American missions were closed, for 
there were none to tend and care for. Even if 
the massacres had not occurred, the entry of 
America into the war would have resulted in a 
similar cessation of their work, and most prob- 
ably in a massacre of the American missioners 
themselves. Their withdrawal, of course, was 
hailed with a peacock scream of pride by that 
enlightened body under Talaat and Enver, called 
the New Turkish party of Progress, for their 
presence was a bar to the Turkish notions of 
civilisation, in that their influence made for hu- 
manity, and health and education. Now "the 
humiliating and dangerous situation" (to quote 
from the columns of Hilal) was put an end to, 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 117 

and Turkish progress could make headway 
again. 

Similarly in Syria the outbreak of war put an 
end to "the humiliating and dangerous situa- 
tion' ' of the presence of French schools and 
missions. There, for many years, French mis- 
sioners had done the same work as Americans 
in Armenia, work in every sense liberal and 
civilising, but undenominational in religious 
matters and unproselytising. That came to an 
end earlier than the organisations in Armenia, 
and in Syria now, as over the rest of the Turk- 
ish people, Arabs and Jews and Greeks have 
nothing except German influence and Kultur to 
stand between them and the spirit of Turkish 
progress of which the Armenian massacres were 
the latest epiphany. Germany, as we have seen, 
stood by and let the Armenian massacres go on, 
professing herself unable to interfere in the 
internal affairs of Turkey, though at the time 
there was not a single branch of Turkish indus- 
tries, railways, telegraphs, armies, navies over 
which she had not complete control, exercising it 
precisely as she thought fit. 

It is useless, then, to base any confidence in 
the safety of Jews, Greeks, and Arabs from 
suffering the same fate as the Armenians, on a 
veto from Germany. If it suits Germany to let 



118 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

those unfortunate peoples be murdered or de- 
ported to agricultural colonies, Germany will 
assuredly not stir a ringer on their behalf nor 
prevent a repetition of the horrors I have dealt 
with in the previous chapter. Sooner than risk 
her hold over Turkey by enforcing unacceptable 
demands, she will, unless other considerations 
of self-interest determine her, let further mas- 
sacres occur, if Talaat Bey insists on them. 
That spokesman of her policy, Ernst Marre, 
makes this perfectly explicit in his book, Die 
Turhen und Wir nach dem Kriege, upholding 
from the German standpoint the right of Tur- 
key and the wisdom of Turkey in dealing with 
her subject peoples as she had dealt with the 
Armenians. "The Turkish State," he tells us, 
"is no united whole: Turks, Arabs, Greeks, 
Armenians, Kurds, cannot be welded together." 
(This, by a somewhat grim and ominous coinci- 
dence, is in exact accordance with a remark 
made to a Danish Red Cross Sister by a Turk- 
ish gendarme then engaged in massacring Ar- 
menians. ' * First we get rid of the Armenians, ' ' 
he said, "then the Greeks, then the Kurds.") 
Or again, in defence of the Armenian massacres, 
"Only by energetic interference and by expell- 
ing of the obstinate Armenian element, could 
the Ottoman Empire get rid of a Russian do- 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTIN E 119 

million. ' ' Or again, ' ' The non-Turkish popula- 
tion of the Ottoman Empire must be Ottoman- 
ised. ' ' Here, then, is the German point of view : 
the Ottoman Government will be right to "dis- 
pose of" its subject peoples as it thinks fit. So 
far from interfering, Germany endorses, and 
German influence to-day is all that stands be- 
tween "the murderous tyranny" and its subject 
peoples. French, English, and finally American 
pressure can no longer, since the entry of these 
nations into the war, be exercised within the 
frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, and the only 
protection of defenceless aliens is the German 
Government. It did not stir a finger to save 
the Armenians, until it saw that depopulation 
threatened the prosperity of its industries, and 
it is idle to expect that it will do more if the 
consolidation of Turkish supremacy demands a 
further campaign of murder. Greeks, Arabs, 
and Jews are all completely at the mercy of 
Talaat's murder-schedules. The only chance 
that can save them is that further extermina- 
tion may not suit Germany's political aims, and 
that she may find it worth her while to be 
peremptory, and forbid instead of endorsing. 

There are unhappily many signs that the 
butehers of Constantinople are planning fur- 
ther massacres. In February of this year pre- 



120 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

liminary measures were begun against the 
Greeks settled in Anatolia. Many were forcibly 
proselytised, their property was confiscated, 
and they were forbidden to carry on their busi- 
nesses. Deportations also occurred, and all 
Greeks were removed from many villages in 
Anatolia, into the interior, presumably to 
"agricultural colonies' ' such as those provided 
for Armenians. They suffered terribly from 
hunger and exposure, and it is estimated that 
ten per cent, of them died on their marches. 
Since then, however, there has been no more 
heard of any extension of those measures, and 
there seems to have been as yet no massacre of 
Greeks. It is reasonable to infer that Germany 
has in this case intervened. She still hoped to 
win Greece over to the Central European 
Powers, and clearly any massacre of Greeks by 
her own Allies was not desirable. King Con- 
stantine, among his endless vacillations and 
pusillanimous treacheries, probably made a firm 
protest on the subject. But in the kaleidoscope 
of war, should Greece come to the side of the 
Allies, it seems most probable that there will 
occur a wholesale massacre of Greeks. From 
what we know of the principles on which Ger- 
man Kultur is based, the most optimistic can 
i 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 121 

scarcely hope that the very faintest remon- 
strance will emanate from Berlin. 

The case of the Arabs in Syria is even more 
precarious. From the moment that the policy 
of the Young Turks was evolved, namely, to 
consolidate Osmanli supremacy by the weaken- 
ing of its subject peoples, the Ottoman Govern- 
ment has been waiting for its opportunity to get 
rid of the "Arab menace." As we have seen, 
they began by substituting Turkish for Arabic 
as a written language in all official usages from 
the printing of the Koran and the prayers for 
the Sultan down to the legends on railway 
tickets. The Arab spirit, according to one of 
the spokesmen of the New Turk party, had to 
be suppressed, the Arab lands had to become 
Turkish colonies. * ' It is a peculiarly imperious 
necessity of our existence," we read in Jelal 
Noury Bey's propaganda, "to Turkise the Arab 
lands, for the particularistic idea of nationality 
is awakening among the younger generations of 
Arabs, and already threatens us with a great 
catastrophe." Against the Arabs the Young 
Turks formed and fostered a special animosity; 
they were powerful and warlike, and Enver, 
Talaat, and others saw that the idea of an Os- 
manli supremacy could never be realised unless 
very drastic measures were taken against them.' 



122 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

The tenets of Islamism, it is true, forbade Mos- 
lems to fight Moslems, but Islamism, as a bind- 
ing force, was already obsolete in the counsels 
of the new regime, having given place to Kul- 
tur. Of all their subject peoples, the Young 
Turks hated the Arabs the most, and, had not 
the European War intervened, there is ho doubt 
that the Armenian massacres, already being 
planned, would have been followed by Arab 
massacres. But the armed and warlike Arabian 
tribes were not so easy to deal with as the de- 
fenceless Armenians, and Turkish troops could 
not be spared in sufficient numbers to render an 
Arab massacrp the safe, pleasant, and lucrative 
pursuit that massacres should be. But Jemal 
the Great, black with his triumph over the Ar- 
menians at Zeitun, was Military Governor of 
Syria, and, the Armenian question being solved, 
he began to get to work on the Arab question. 
Owing to the expulsion of the French Missions 
from Syria in 1914, we have no such full or 
detailed information as we have from Ameri- 
cans in Armenia, and the following account is 
mainly derived from the Arabic journal Mohat- 
tam, published in Cairo, the information in 
which is based on the account given by a Syrian 
refugee. It agrees with pieces of evidence that 
have come to hand from other sources. 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 123 

Ever since the beginning of the war Syria has 
been an area of direst poverty, starvation, and 
sickness, which have been the natural co-opera- 
tors in Jemal's policy there. All supplies have 
been (commandeered for the troops (including 
by special clause from Potsdam, the German 
troops) ; even fish caught by the fishermen of 
Lebanon have to be handed over to the military 
authorities, and the shortage of supplies in 
Smyrna, for instance, is such that, at the end of 
1916 there were two hundred deaths daily from 
sheer starvation, while Germany was importing 
from Turkey hundreds of tons of corn and of 
meat. Thus this was no natural shortage, for 
though supplies were low all over the Turkish 
Empire, there was not dearth of that kind. It 
was an artificial shortage made possible by 
German demands, and made intentional by 
JemaPs policy. Beirut was in no better case 
than Smyrna; Lebanon perhaps was in sorer 
straits than either. Money was equally scarce, 
and it fitted JemaPs policy that this should be 
so, for when Americans in Beirut had raised 
funds in America for the relief of the destitute, 
the Turkish Government forbade their distribu- 
tion. Arabs and Greeks were dying by the hun- 
dred all over the provinces, and the beneficent 
decrees of nature must not be interfered with. 



124 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 






In the streets of towns the poor have been fight- 
ing over scraps of sugar-cane and orange peel ; 
in the country, to quote from Mokattam, "no 
sooner do wild plants and beans start to grow 
than the fields are filled with women and chil- 
dren who pick them and use them as food." 
Except for military purposes (including the vic- 
tualling of German troops) transportation has 
ceased to exist, and this, too, was part of the 
policy of Jemal the Great. 

On the heels of famine, like a hound behind 
a huntsman, came typhus. In the province of 
Aleppo before the summer of 1916, over 8000 
persons had died of it. Doctors and medicines 
were unobtainable, for all were requisitioned for 
the needs of the army, and in Damascus and 
Tripoli, in Hama and Horns, the epidemic 
spread like a forest fire. No help was sent from 
Constantinople, none was permitted to be 
brought by the charitable from abroad, for fam- 
ine and pestilence among the Arabs were work- 
ing for the policy of Jemal the Great. There 
were no troops to spare who should hasten on 
the work, but the work was progressing by 
swift and " natural ' ' means. Hunger and pesti- 
lence — behold the finger of Allah the God of 
Love ! How superior He showed Himself to the 
discarded Allah of the Arabs. ' ' Ring down the 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 125 

curtain,' ' said Jemal the Great, "and let no 
news of the ways of Allah get abroad !" So a 
strict surveillance was established on the coast, 
all boats were chained to the shore, and if any 
attempted to swim out to ships of the Allied 
nations which passed, the coast guards had or- 
ders to shoot him down. Too much news about 
Armenian massacres filtered through; there 
should not now be such leakage. And when 
starvation and pestilence had firmly established 
themselves, Jemal the Great went down to see 
what his personal exertions could effect. All 
was working in accordance with his plan; the 
poorer classes of Arabs were dying like flies, 
but mortality was not so successful among the 
wealthier, who could, to some extent, purchase 
food. So Jemal the Great set to work among 
them. He began by hanging the heads of 
Syrian Arabs in Damascus, Beirut, and other 
cities. No semblance of trial, no prosecution or 
arraignment, were necessary: he established 
courts-martial under military control, made lists 
of the accused, and ordered the courts-martial 
to condemn them to death. Sometimes he made 
mistakes, appointing as the members of his 
court-martial men who were not such sturdy 
patriots as he, and refused to sentence for no 
crime the accused whom he nominated. He rem- 



126 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

edied such mistakes by appointing new boards 
of more seasoned stuff. Moslem and Christian 
alike were brought before them, and a general 
accusation of pro-French tendencies seems to 
have been sufficient to secure a sentence of death 
or lifelong imprisonment. He aimed not at the 
poor and the obscure ; for whom hunger and 
pestilence were providing, but at the rich and 
the influential. The higher clergy in Christian 
circles, Bishops and Monsignors, were a fa- 
vourite target, and among Moslems influential 
Sheikhs. Sometimes there was a parody of a 
trial ; sometimes the parody was dispensed with, 
and when the black curtain was last raised over 
Syria, Jemal the Great had disposed of over 
eight hundred of the heads of the most influen- 
tial of Syrian Arabs. He had got rid, in fact, 
of the whole House of Lords, and something 
more. Those who are acquainted with "feudal 
values ' ' among the Arabs will understand what 
that means. He decapitated, not individuals 
only, but groups. For devilish ingenuity in this 
combination of starvation and pestilence for the 
poor, and death or lifelong imprisonment for 
the chiefs, Jemal the Great must take rank with 
Abdul Hamid and the contrivers of the Ar- 
menian massacres. He cannot, it is true, owing 
to lack of troops, obtain the swift results of 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 127 

mmmmmm——mmmmmmmmmmmmm^i^m—mmm——mmmmmmmmm—m——mmmmmmm—mmm—^m^mm^—t—^—^mmmmmmm^——am 

Enver in Armenia, but between typhus, starva- 
tion, and courts-martial, bis solution of the Arab 
question in Syria is making steady progress. 
And those measures, hideously efficient in them- 
selves, are, beyond any doubt whatever, only 
the precursors of more sweeping exterminations 
of the Arab race, which will be effected after 
the war, if the Allied Powers do not step in to 
save it. The Faithful of the Holy City, Mecca, 
have revolted and thrown off the Turkish yoke, 
and while the war lasts, and Turkish troops are 
otherwise occupied under Teutonic supervision, 
they will be able to maintain their independence, 
for there is no considerable body of Turks which 
can seriously threaten them. But the Syrian 
Arabs, so long as the war lasts, are being, and 
will be, the victims of a quiet scheme of ex- 
termination, which, if long continued, will be as 
complete as that devised and carried out by the 
butchers of Constantinople for the peoples of 
Armenia. It is not in the interest of the Ger- 
mans to save them, and no check is being put 
on Jemal the Great to hinder him from assist- 
ing starvation and typhus to ravage the coun- 
try, and supplementing their deadly work by 
court-martial without trial. 

Equally significant of the rage for the de- 
struction of Arabs was the "treatment of the 



128 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Bagdad Arab army corps. In spite of the need 
for troops one half of it was sent from Bagdad 
to Erzerum in the depth of winter, without any 
provision of warm clothing. There, in those 
cold uplands, the men died at the rate of fifty 
to sixty a day. Their commanding officer was 
a Turk, and a creature of Enver's, called Abdul 
Kader. Though these troops had fought ad- 
mirably, he openly called them Arab traitors, 
and his orders seem to have been merely to get 
rid of them. There were no courts-martial; 
they were just taken into a climate which killed 
them. 

While for the last thirty years the Armenians 
and Syrians have emigrated in large numbers 
from the Ottoman Empire, there has been a 
large immigration of Jews into it. This move- 
ment was originally due to the persecution they 
suffered in Russia. Germany and Austria were 
closed to them, and, flying from the hideous 
pogroms that threatened them with extermina- 
tion, they began to settle in Palestine. Wealthy 
compatriots such as Baron Edmond de Roths- 
child assisted them, and, with the amazing ver- 
satility of their race, they, trades-people and 
town-folk, adapted themselves to new condi- 
tions, turned their wits towards husbandry and 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 129 

agriculture, and during the last thirty years 
have flourished and multiplied in a manner quite 
unrealised by the western world. In 1881 there 
were not more than 25,000 of them in the home 
of their race, but by the beginning of the Euro- 
pean War, when their immigration ceased for 
the present, they numbered 120,000 souls. Till 
then the Ottoman Government adopted the an- 
cient Turkish policy of neglect towards them, 
for they were not powerful enough numerically 
to earn the honour of a massacre, and, in addi- 
tion, they were useful settlers. Backed by 
powerful Western influence, French, English, 
and German alike, they improved out of knowl- 
edge the values of the lands where they estab- 
lished themselves, and by intelligent manage- 
ment, by conserving and increasing the water 
supply with irrigation and well-digging, they 
have brought many thousand acres into cultiva- 
tion. Originally refugees, fleeing from out- 
rageous persecutions, their immigration by de- 
grees took on a different spirit. Not only were 
they coming out of captivity, but they were 
entering into the ancient Land of Promise 
again. Zionism, the spirit of the returning 
exiles, animated them, and, according to their 
prophets, they realised that "The Lord shall 
comfort Zion, He shall comfort all her waste 



130 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

places." They had sowed in tears; now, on 
their return, they were reaping in joy, and, 
though their land was still under the infidel 
yoke, they were allowed to dwell in peace, busy, 
industrious, with the halo of home-coming in 
their hearts. They paid, of course, their Turk- 
ish taxes, but these were not levied in any op- 
pressive manner, and their colonies were thrifty, 
self-governing and prosperous, Already before 
the war, one-tenth of the cultivated land in 
Palestine was in their hands, they had their own 
schools, their own methods of organisation, and, 
more significant than all, Hebrew became a liv- 
ing language again. Germany, intent on her 
penetration of Turkey, made an attempt to Ger- 
manise them also (for Germany, as we shall 
see, has a very special interest in these Jewish 
colonies), shook her head over Zionism, for 
which she tried to substitute Prussianism, and 
wanted to make the German language compul- 
sory in Jewish schools at Haifa and Jaffa, but 
her effort completely failed. Nothing could 
show the inherent vitality of this Jewish colon- 
isation more strikingly. 

These Jewish settlers then were left in peace ; 
from minuteness they escaped the notice of the 
Young Turk party in its schemes for the com- 
plete Ottomanisation of the Empire, and, until 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 181 

^— —a i i ii — ^— . I mi 

the present year 1917, no mention of "the Jew- 
ish question' ' was propounded. But it will be 
remembered that in 1915, certain Jewish refu- 
gees, taking warning from the Armenian mas- 
sacres, fled to Egypt, and there founded a Zion- 
ist mule-corps, which served under the English 
in the Gallipoli campaign. It seems very prob- 
able that it was this that directed the attention 
of Jemal the Great to the Jewish colonies in 
Palestine : possibly it was merely that he was a 
more thorough Ottomaniser than his colleagues 
in Constantinople. In any case he ordered the 
"deportation" of all Jews from Jaffa, Gaza, 
and other agricultural districts. All Jews were 
commanded to leave Jaffa within forty-eight 
hours, no means of transport was given them, 
and they were forbidden to take with them 
either provisions or any of their belongings. 
Eight thousand Jews were evicted from Jaffa 
alone, and their houses were pillaged, and they 
robbed, maltreated, and many were murdered. 
Thus, and in no other way had the massacres of 
the Armenians begun, and, that there should be 
no mistake about it, Jemal threatened them ex- 
plicitly with the fate of the Armenians. Next 
day Ludd was evacuated also ; the evacuation of 
Haifa and Jerusalem was threatened, and artil- 
lery was sent to Jerusalem. There can be no 



132 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

doubt in fact that Jemal planned and began to 
carry out a massacre of all Jews. 

At that point the Germans intervened, and 
for the present (but only for the present, for so 
long in fact as Germany has complete control 
over all Turkish internal affairs, in which she 
protested she could not meddle) the Jewish col- 
onies in Palestine seem to be safe. 1 The Ger- 
man chief of the General Staff telegraphed to 
Berlin that the "military considerations ' ' on 
which Jemal based his deportations did not 
exist, and Herr Cohn in the Reichstag drew the 
Imperial Chancellor's attention to this. How 
seriously the menace was regarded in Germany, 
and how far the deportations had gone may be 
gathered from his words, "Is the Imperial 
Chancellor prepared to influence the Turkish 
Government in such a manner as to prevent 
with certainty — so far as this is still possible — 
a repetition in Palestine of the Armenian atroci- 
ties V This was sufficient: Germany, who 
could not dream of interfering in Turkish in- 
ternal affairs when only the massacre of hun- 
dreds of thousands of Armenians was con- 

1 This view seems to be borne out by subsequent events, for 
the Jews evacuated from Jaffa have been permitted to return 
owing to the intervention of the Spanish Government. It is not 
hard to guess who prompted that. 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 133 

cemed, sent her order, and, for the present, 
Jemal the Great has been unable to proceed 
with the solution of the Jewish question in Tur- 
key, which he had just discovered. We need 
not yet in fact give Jemal his Jew. But some 
sort of explanation to soothe the exasperation 
of the Turks in not being allowed to murder 
when and how and where they pleased, was 
thought advisable, and the explanation (an ex- 
traordinarily significant one) was given in an 
inspired paragraph of the Frankfurter Zeitung 
not long after. "The valuable structure of 
Zionist cultural work, in which the German Em- 
pire must have well founded interest in view of 
future and very promising trade relations, will, 
it is very much to be hoped, be preserved from 
destruction so far as purely military require- 
ments do not make it necessary. Pan-Turkish 
ideals have no sort of meaning in Palestine 
where practically no Turks dwell. ' ' 

We may take it, then, that with regard to the 
projected Jewish massacres, quite clearly fore- 
shadowed by the schemes of deportation from 
Jaffa and Gaza, Germany has made strong rep- 
resentations to the Ottoman Government. She 
did not do so (indeed she officially refused to 
do so) when the Armenian massacres began, for 
she could not interfere in Turkey's internal af- 



134 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

fairs. But now she has discovered that Pan- 
Turkish ideals have no sort of meaning in Pales- 
tine, and thus, with amazing astuteness, has 
provided herself with a reason for interfering, 
while still not giving up the policy of non- 
interference in Turkish affairs, for Turkey, she 
has discovered, has no affairs in Palestine. At 
the same time she guards herself from diplo- 
matic defeat by the hope that Zionist cultural 
work will be saved from destruction so far as 
purely military requirements do not make it 
necessary. In other words, supposing Jemal 
the Great got completely out of hand, and pro- 
ceeded to indiscriminate massacre of the Jews, 
Germany would doubtless accept his plea that 
military requirements had made it necessary. 
. . . And we were once so ignorant as to assure 
ourselves that Germany had no notions of diplo- 
macy ! 

The full significance of her intervention on 
behalf of the Jews, when neither the extermina- 
tion of the Armenians, the persecution of the 
Arabs, nor the deportation of the Greeks moved 
Germany to any decided action or energetic pro- 
test, must be left, in so far as it concerns the 
future, to another chapter. But as regards the 
present and the past it will be useful to con- 
sider here what has prompted her to make a 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 135 

■ ' — — ^— ■— — — — — g 

protest (which we may regard, so long as her 
foot is on the neck of the Turks, as having been 
successful) against these projected massacres. 
Certainly it was not humanity; it was not the 
faintest desire to save innocent people in gen- 
eral from being murdered wholesale, for in the 
similar case of the Armenians, her bowels of 
compassion were not moved. Or, possibly, if 
we incline to lenience, we may say that she was 
sorry for the Armenians, but could not then 
risk a disagreement with their murderers 
who were her allies, whereas now, feeling 
herself more completely dominant over the 
Turks than she then did, she could risk 
being peremptory, especially since there was 
that saving clause about military require- 
ments. For during the Armenian massacres, 
the Dardanelles expedition was still on the 
shores of Gallipoli, and the menace to Con- 
stantinople acute. It was possible that if she 
opposed a firm front to the Armenian massa- 
cres, the Turks, already on the verge of despair 
with regard to saving the capital from capture, 
might have made terms with the Allies. But 
now no such imminence of danger threatened 
them, and, with Germany's domination over 
them vastly more secure than it had been in 
1915, she could afford to treat them less as allies 



136 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

and more as a conquered people. This alone 
might have accounted for her unprecedented im- 
pulse of humanity in the minds of those who 
still attribute such instincts to her, but she had 
far stronger reasons than that for wanting to 
save the Jews of Palestine. 

Her policy with regard to them is set forth 
in a pamphlet by Dr. Davis Treitsch, called 
Die Juden der Turkei, published in 1915, which 
is a most illuminating little document. These 
Jewish colonies, as we have seen, came from 
Russia, and as Germany realised, long before 
the war, they might easily form a German 
nucleus in the Near East, for they largely con- 
sisted of German-speaking Jews, akin in lan- 
guage and blood to a most important element 
in her own population. "In a certain sense," 
says Dr. Treitsch, "the Jews are a Near East- 
ern element in Germany and a German element 
in Turkey. ' ' He goes on with unerring acumen 
to lament the exodus of German-speaking Jews 
to the United States and to England. "An- 
nually some 100,000 of these are lost to Ger- 
many, the empire of the English language and 
the economic system that goes with it is being 
enlarged, while a German asset is being propor- 
tionately depreciated. ... It will no longer do 
simply to close the German frontiers to them, 



QUESTION OF SYRIA AND PALESTINE 137 

and in view of the difficulties which would re- 
sult from a wholesale migration of Jews into 
Germany itself, Germans will only be too glad 
to find a way out in the emigration of those Jews 
to Turkey — a solution extraordinarily favour- 
able to the interests of all three parties con- 
cerned. ' ' 

Here, then, is the matter in a nutshell : Ger- 
many, wide-awake as ever, saw long ago the 
advantage to her of a growing Jewish popula- 
tion from the Pale in Turkey. She was perhaps 
a little overloaded with them herself, but in this 
immigration from Eussia to Palestine she saw 
the formation of a colony that was well worth 
German protection, and the result of the war, 
provided the Palestinian immigrants were left 
in peace, would be to augment very largely the 
number of those settling there. ' ' Galicia, ' ' says 
Dr. Treitsch, "and the western provinces of 
Eussia, which between them contain more than 
half the Jews in the world, have suffered more 
from the war than any other region. Jewish 
homes have been broken up by hundreds of 
thousands, and there is no doubt whatever that, 
as a result of the war, there will be an emigra- 
tion of East European Jews on an unprece- 
dented scale. ' ' This emigration, then, to Pales- 
tine was, in Germany's view, a counterweight to 



138 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

* II — — M— —— 

| -■■ — - — ■■.■-...■ ■■■■ .. ... -.- i i i ■■... — — ■ ——— .I,. It4 

the 100,000 annually lost to her through emigra- 
tion to America and England. "With her foot 
on Turkey's neck she had control over these 
German-speaking Jews, and saw in them the ele- 
ments of a German colony. Her calculations, 
it is true, were somewhat upset by the develop- 
ment of the Zionist movement, by which those 
settlers declared themselves to have a national- 
ity of their own, and a language of their own, 
and Dr. Treitsch concedes that. "But," he 
adds, "in addition to Hebrew, to which they are 
more and more inclined, the Jews must have a 
world-language, and this can only be German." 
This, then, in brief, and only up to the pres- 
ent, is the story of how the Jewish massacres 
were stayed. The Jews were potential Ger- 
mans, and Germany, who sat by with folded 
hands when Arabs and Armenians were led to 
torture and death, put up a warning finger, and, 
for the present, saved them. In her whole con- 
duct of the war, nothing has been more char- 
acteristic than her "verboten" to one projected 
massacre and her acquiescence in others. But, 
as for her having saved the Jews out of motives 
of humanity, ' ' Credant Judaei ! " 



CHAPTEB V 

Deutschland uber Aliah 

It was commonly said at the beginning of this 
war that, whatever Germany's military re- 
sources might be, she was hopelessly and child- 
ishly lacking in diplomatic ability and in knowl- 
edge of psychology, from which all success in 
diplomacy is distilled. As instances of this 
grave defect, people adduced the fact that, ap- 
parently, she had not anticipated the entry of 
Great Britain into the war at all, while her 
treatment of Belgium immediately afterwards 
was universally pronounced to be not a crime 
merely, but a blunder of the stupidest sort. It 
is perfectly true that Germany did not under- 
stand, and, as seems likely in the light of in- 
numerable other atrocities, never will under- 
stand, the psychology of civilised peoples; she 
has never shown any signs up till now, at any 
rate, of "having got the hang of it" at all. But 
critics of her diplomacy failed to see the root- 
fact that she did not understand it merely be- 
cause it did not interest her. It was not worth 

139 



140 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

— ^ — — —— — 

her while to master the psychology of other civ- 
ilised nations, since she was out not to under- 
stand them, but to conquer them. She had all 
the information she wanted about their armies 
and navies and guns and ammunition neatly and 
correctly tabulated. Why, then, since this was 
all that concerned her, should she cram her head 
with irrelevant information about what they 
might feel on the subject of gas-attacks or the 
torpedoing of neutral ships without warning? 
As long as her fumes were deadly and her sub- 
marines subtle, nothing further concerned her. 
But Europe generally made a great mistake 
in supposing that Germany could not learn psy- 
chology, and the process of its distillation into 
diplomacy when it interested her. The psychol- 
ogy of the French and English was a useless 
study, for she was merely going to fight them, 
but for years she had been studying with an 
industry and a patience that put our diplomacy 
to shame (as was most swiftly and ignomini- 
ously proven when it came into conflict with 
hers) the psychology of the Turks. For years 
she had watched the dealings of the Great 
Powers with Turkey, but she had never really 
associated herself with that policy. She sat 
quietly by and saw how it worked. Briefly it 
was this. For a hundred years Turkey had been 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 141 

kept alive in Europe by the sedulous attentions 
of the Physician Powers, who dared not let him 
die for fear of the stupendous quarrels which 
would instantly arise over his corpse. So there 
they all sat round his bed, and kept him alive 
with injections of strychnine and oxygen, and, 
no less, by a policy of rousing and irritating the 
patient. All through the reign of Abdul Hamid 
they persevered : Great Britain plucked his pil- 
low from him, so to speak, by her protectorate 
of Egypt; Eussia tweaked Eastern Eumelia 
from him ; France deprived him of his hot-water 
bottle when she snatched at the Constantinople 
quays, and they all shook and slapped him when 
he went to war with Greece in 1896, and in- 
stantly deprived him of the territory he had 
won in Thessaly. That was the principle of 
European diplomacy towards Turkey, and from 
it Germany always held aloof. 

But from about the beginning of the reign of 
the present German Emperor, German or rather 
Prussian diplomacy had been going quietly 
about its work. It was worth while to study the 
psychology of the Turks, because dimly then, 
but with ever-increasing distinctness, Germany 
foresaw that Turkey might be a counter of im- 
mense importance in the great conflict which 
was assuredly drawing nearer, though as yet its 



142 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

existence was but foreshadowed by the most dis- 
tant reflections of summer lightning on a serene 
horizon. But if Turkey was to be of any profit 
to her, she wanted a strong Turkey who could 
fight with her (or rather for her), and she had 
no use for the Sick Man whom the other Powers 
were bent on keeping alive, but no more. Her 
own eventual domination of Turkey was always 
the end in view, but she wanted to dominate not 
a weak but a strong servant. And her diplo- 
macy was not less than brilliant simply from 
the fact that on the one hand it soothed Turkey 
instead of irritating, and, on the other, that it 
went absolutely unnoticed for a long time No- 
body knew that it was going on. She sent offi- 
cers to train the Turkish army, well knowing 
what magnificent material Anatolia afforded, 
and she had thoroughly grasped the salient fact 
that to make any way with Oriental peoples 
your purse must be open and your backshish 
unlimited. l i There is no God but backshish, and 
the Deutsche Bank is his prophet.' ' 

For years this went on very quietly, and all 
over the great field of the Ottoman Empire the 
first tiny blades of the crop that Germany was 
sowing began to appear. To-day that crop 
waves high, and covers the whole field with its 
ripe and fruitful ears. For to-day Turkey is 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 143 

neither more nor less than a German colony, 
and more than makes up to her for the colonies 
she has lost and hopes to regain. She knows 
that perfectly well, and so do any who have at 
all studied the history and the results of her 
diplomacy there. Even Turkey itself must, as 
in an uneasy dream, be faintly conscious of it. 
For who to-day is the Sultan of Turkey? No 
other than William n. of Germany. It is in 
Berlin that his Cabinet meets, and sometimes he 
asks Talaat Bey to attend in a strictly honorary 
capacity. And Talaat Bey goes back to Con- 
stantinople with a strictly honorary sword of 
honour. Or else he gives one to William n. 
from his soi-disant master, the Sultan, or takes 
one back to his soi-disant master from his real 
master. For no one knows better than William 
ii. the use that swords of honour play In deeds 
of dishonour. 

The object of this chapter is to trace and 
mount the hewn and solid staircase of steps by 
which Germany's present supremacy over Tur- 
key was achieved. 

Apart from the quiet spade-work that had 
been going on for some years, Germany made 
no important move till the moment when, in 
1909, the Young Turk party, after the forced 
abdication of Abdul Hamid, proclaimed the aims 



144 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

and ideals of the new regime. At once Ger- 
many saw her opportunity, for here, with her 
help, might arise the strong Turkey which she 
desired to see, instead of the weak Turkey which 
all the other European Powers had been keep- 
ing on a lowering diet for so long (desirous only 
that it should not quite expire), and from that 
moment she began to lend, or rather let, to 
Turkey, in ever-increasing quantities, the re- 
sources of her scientific and her military knowl- 
edge. It was in her interests, if Turkey was to 
be of use to her, that she should educate, and 
irrigate, and develop the unexploited treasures 
of human material, of fertility and mineral 
wealth; and Germany's gold, her schools, her 
laboratories were at Turkey's disposal. But in 
every case she, as in duty bound to her people, 
saw that she got very good value for her out- 
lay. 

Here, then, was the great psychological mo- 
ment when Germany instantly moved. The 
Young Turks proclaimed that they were going 
to weld the Ottoman Empire into one homo- 
geneous and harmonious whole, and by a piece 
of brilliant paradoxical reasoning Germany de- 
termined that it was she who was going to do it 
for them. In flat contradiction of the spirit of 
their manifestoes, which proclaimed the Pan- 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 145 



Turkish ideal, she conceived and began to carry 
out under their very noses the great new chap- 
ter of the Pan-Germanic ideal. And the Young 
Turks did not know the difference ! They mis- 
took that lusty Teutonic changeling for their 
own new-born Turkish babe, and they nursed 
and nourished it. Amazingly it throve, and soon 
it cut its teeth, and one day, when they thought 
it was asleep, it arose from its cradle a baby no 
more, but a great Prussian guardsman who 
shouted, "Deutschland iiber Allah !" 

Only once was there a check in the growth of 
the Prussian infant, and that was no more than 
a childish ailment. For when the Balkan wars 
broke out the Turkish army was in the transi- 
tional stage. Its German tutors had not yet 
had time to inspire the army with German disci- 
pline and tradition; they had only weeded out, 
so to speak, the old Turkish spirit, the blind 
obedience to the Ministers of the Shadow of 
God. The Shadow of God, in fact, in the person 
of the Sultan, had been dragged out into the 
light, and his Shadow had grown appreciably 
less. In consequence there was not at this junc- 
ture any cohesion in the army, and it suffered 
reverse after reverse. But a strong though a 
curtailed Turkey was more in accordance with 
Prussian ideas than a weak and sprawling one, 



146 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

and Germany bore the Turkish defeats very val- 
iantly. And that was the only set-back that 
this Pan-Prussian youngster experienced, and 
it was no more than an attack of German 
measles which he very quickly got over. For 
two or three years German influence wavered, 
then recovered, "with blessings on the falling 
out, that all the more endears." 

It is interesting to see how Germany adapted 
the Pan-Turkish ideal to her own ends, and, by 
a triumphant vindication of Germany's meth- 
ods, the best account of this Pan-Turkish ideal 
is to be found in a publication of 1915 by Tekin 
Alp, which was written as German propaganda 
and by Germany disseminated broadcast over 
the Turkish Empire. An account of this move- 
ment has already been given in Chapter n., as 
far as the Turkish side of it is concerned, and 
it remains only to enumerate the German con- 
tribution to the fledging of this new Turkish 
Phoenix. The Turkish language and the Turk- 
ish Allah, God of Love, in whose name the Ar- 
menians were tortured and massacred, were the 
two wings on which it was to soar. Auxiliary 
soaring societies were organised, among them 
a Turkish Ojagha with similar aims, and no 
fewer than sixteen branches of it were founded 
throughout the Empire. There were also a 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 147 



Turkish Guiji or gymnastic club, and an Izji or 
boy scouts' club. A union of merchants worked 
for the same object in districts where hitherto 
trade had been in the hands of Greeks and Ar- 
menians, and signs appeared on their shops that 
only Turkish labour was employed. Religious 
funds also were used for similar economic 
restoration. 

Germany saw, Germany tabulated, Germany 
licked her lips and took out her long spoon, for 
her hour was come. She did not interfere : she 
only helped to further the Pan-Turkish ideal. 
With her usual foresight she perceived that the 
Izji, for instance, was a thing to encourage, for 
the boys who were being trained now would in 
a few years be precisely the young men of whom 
she could not have too many. By all means the 
boy scout movement was to be encouraged. She 
encouraged it so generously and methodically 
that in 1916, according to an absolutely reliable 
source of information, we find that the whole 
boy scout movement, with its innumerable 
branches, was under the control of a German 
officer, Colonel von Hoff. In its classes (der- 
neks) boys are trained in military practices, in 
"a recreational manner,' ' so that they enjoy — 
positively enjoy (a Prussian touch) — the exer- 
cises that will fit them to be of use to the Sultan 



148 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

William n. They learn trigger-drill, they learn 
skirmishing, they are taught to make reports on 
the movements of their companies, they are 
shown neat ways of judging distances. They 
are divided into two classes, the junior class 
ranging from the ages of twelve to seventeen, 
the senior class consisting of boys over seven- 
teen, but not yet of military age. But since 
Colonel von Hoff organised this, the military 
age has been extended, and boys of seventeen 
have got to serve their country on German 
fronts. Prussian thoroughness, therefore, saw 
that their training must begin earlier ; the old 
junior class has become the senior class, and a 
new junior class has been set on foot which 
begins its recreational exercises in the service 
of William n., Gott and Allah, at the age of 
eight. It is all great fun, but those pigeon- 
livered little boys who are not diverted by it 
have to go on with their fun all the same, for, 
needless to say, the Izji is compulsory on all 
boys. Of course they wear a uniform which is 
made in Germany and is of a "semi-military" 
character. 

The provision of soldiers and sailors, then, 
trained from the early age of eight, was the first 
object of Germany's peaceful and benign pene- 
tration. As from the Pisgah height of the Pan- 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 149 

WI^^BMPMMMMnMMMMW— —M»— ^iM ' ' ■ ' ■■'■ — — a B ll M III I II 

Turkish ideal she saw the promised land, but 
she had no idea of seeing it only, like Moses, 
and expiring without entering it, and her faith 
that she would enter it and possess it and or- 
ganise it has been wonderfully justified. She 
has not only penetrated, but has dominated; a 
year ago towns like Aleppo were crammed with 
German officers, while at Islahie there were sep- 
arate wooden barracks for the exclusive use of 
German troops. There is a military mission 
at Mamoura, where all the buildings are per- 
manent erections solidly built of stone, for no 
merely temporary occupation is intended, and 
thousands of freight-cars with Belgian marks 
upon them throng the railways, and on some is 
the significant German title of ' ' Military Head- 
quarters of the Imperial Staff.' ' There are 
troops in the Turkish army, to which is given 
the title of "Pasha formation,' ' in compliment 
to Turkey, but the Pasha formations are under 
command of Baron Kress von Kressenstein, and 
are salted with German officers, N.C.O.'s, and 
privates, who, although in the Turkish army, 
retain their German uniforms. 

This German leaven forms an instructional 
class for the remainder of the troops in these 
formations, who are Turkish. The Germans are 
urged to respect Moslem customs and to show 



150 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 



particular consideration for their religions ob- 
servances. Every German contingent arriving 
at Constantinople to join the Pasha formations 
finds quarters prepared on a ship, and when 
the troops leave for their " destination' ' they 
take supplies from depots at the railway sta- 
tion which will last them two or three months. 
They are enjoined to write war diaries, and are 
provided with handbooks on the military and 
geographical conditions in Mesopotamia, with 
maps, and with notes on the training and man- 
agement of camels. This looks as if they were 
intended for use against the English troops in 
Mesopotamia, but I cannot find that they have 
been identified there. The greatest secrecy is 
observed with regard to those Pasha forma- 
tions, and their constitution and movement? 
are kept extremely well veiled. 

Wireless stations have been set up in Asia 
Minor and Palestine, and these are under the 
command of Major Schlee. A Turkish air-serv- 
ice was instituted, at the head of which was 
Major Serno, a Prussian officer, and Turkish 
aviators are now in training at Ostend, where 
they will very usefully defend their native coun- 
try. At Constantinople there is a naval school 
for Turkish engineers and mechanics in the 
arsenal, to help on the Pan-Turkish ideal, and 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 151 

with a view to that all the instructors are Ger- 
man : a floating dock is in construction at Ismid, 
and the order has been placed with German 
firms. It will be capable of accommodating 
ships of Dreadnought build, which is a new de- 
parture for the strictly Pan-Turkish ideal. The 
cost is £740,000, to be repaid three years after 
the end of the war. Similarly, by the spring 
of this year, Germany had arranged to start 
submarine training in Constantinople for the 
Turks, and a submarine school was open and 
at work in March. A few months later it was 
established at the island of Prinkipo, where it 
is now hard at work under German instructors. 
Other naval cadets were sent to Germany for 
their training, and Turkish officers were pres- 
ent at the battle of Jutland in June 1916, and 
of course were decorated by the Emperor in 
person for their coolness and courage. 1 

A complete revision of the Turkish system 
of exemptions from military service was neces- 
sary as soon as Germany began to want men 
badly. The age for military service was first 
raised, and we find a Turkish order of October 

1 In October 1917 a bill was passed for the entire remodelling 
of the Turkish fleet after the war, on the lines of the German 
fleet, ' ' which proved its perfect training in the battle of Skager 
Bak." 



152 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

1916, calling on all men of forty-three, forty- 
four, and forty-five years of age to pay their ex- 
emption tax if they did not wish to be called 
to the colours. That secured their money, and, 
with truly Prussian irony, hardly had this been 
done when a fresh army order was issued calling 
out all men, whether they had paid their ex- 
emption tax or not. Germany thus secured both 
their money and their lives. 

Still more men were needed, and in November 
a fresh levy of boys was raised regardless of 
whether they had reached the military age or 
not. This absorbed the senior class of the boy 
scouts, who hitherto had learned their drill in 
a * ' recreationary manner.' 9 Neither Jews nor 
Christians are exempt from service, and fre- 
quent pressgangs go round Constantinople 
rounding up those who are in hiding. 

Again the Prussian Moloch was hungry for 
more, and in December 1916 the Turkish Gazette 
announced that all males in Asia Minor between 
the ages of fourteen and sixty-five were to be 
enrolled for military service, and in January 
of this year, 1917, fresh recruiting was fore- 
shadowed by the order that men of forty-six to 
fifty-two, who had paid their exemption money, 
should be medically examined to see if they 
were fit for active service. This fresh recruit- 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 153 

ing was also put in force in the case of boys, 
and during the summer of 1917 all boys above 
the age of twelve, provided they were sound and 
well-built, were taken for the army. Wider and 
wider the net was spread, and in the same month 
a fresh Turco-German convention was signed, 
whereby was enforced a reciprocal surrender 
in both countries of persons liable to military 
service, and of deserters, and simultaneously all 
Turks living in Switzerland, and who had paid 
exemption money, were recalled to their Ger- 
manised fatherland. By now the first crops of 
the year were ripening in Smyrna, and in de- 
fault of civilian labour (for every one was now 
a soldier) they were reaped by Turkish soldiers 
and the produce sent direct to Germany. 

Already in August 1916, certificates of Otto- 
man nationality had been granted to Serbians 
resident in the Empire who were willing to be- 
come Ottoman subjects, and their " willingness' ' 
was intensified by hints that incidents akin to 
the Armenian massacres might possibly occur 
among other alien peoples. They had to sign 
a declaration that they would not revert to 
their former nationality, and thus, no doubt, 
many Serbs passed into the Turkish army. Fur- 
ther enrolments were desirable, and, in March 
1917, all Greeks living in Anatolia were forcibly 



154 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

proselytised, their property was confiscated, and 
they were made liable to military service. Un- 
fortunately all were not available, for of those 
who were removed from the villages where they 
lived to military centres, ten per cent, died on 
the forced marches from hunger and exposure. 
That was annoying for the German recruiting 
agents, but it suited well enough the Pan-Turk- 
ish ideal of exterminating foreign nationalities. 
When trouble or discontent occurred among the 
troops, it was firmly dealt with, as, for instance, 
when, in November 1916, there were consider- 
able desertions from the 49th Division. On that 
occasion the order was given to fire on them, and 
many were killed and wounded. The officer who 
gave the order was commended by the Prussian 
authorities for his firmness. Should such an in- 
cident occur again, it will no doubt be dealt with 
no less firmness, for, in April 1917, Macken- 
sen was put in supreme command of all troops 
in Asia Minor. But in spite of this desertions 
have largely increased lately, and during the 
summer deserters out of all the Turkish armies 
were believed to number about 200,000. Many 
of those have formed themselves into brigand 
bands, who make the roads dangerous for trav- 
ellers. The exchange of honours goes on, for 
not long ago, in Berlin, Prince Zia-ed-Din, the 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 155 

Turkish Sultan's heir, presented a sword of 
honour to the Sultan William n. Probably he 
gave him good news of the progress of the Ger- 
man harbour works begun in the winter at Stam- 
boul, and himself learned that the railway 
bridge which the Turks proposed to build over 
the Bosporus was not to be proceeded with, for 
the German high command had superseded that 
scheme by their own idea of making a tunnel 
under the Bosporus instead, which would be 
safer from aircraft. 

Such up-to-date, though in brief outline, is 
the history of the establishment of the Prus- 
sian octopus grip on military and naval matters 
in Turkey. We have largely ourselves to blame 
for it. Upon that pathetic and lamb-like record 
of our diplomacy during the months between 
the outbreak of the European War, and the 
entry of Turkey into it in October 1914, it would 
be morbid to dwell at any length, though a short 
summary is necessary. As we all know now, 
Turkey had concluded a treaty with Germany 
early in August, and when our Ambassador in 
Constantinople, Sir Louis Malet, who was on 
leave in England at that date, returned to his 
post on August 16th, all that Turkey wanted was 
to gain time in which to effect her mobilisation. 
This she did, with complete success, and our 



156 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Ambassador telegraphed to England stating his 
perfect confidence in the sincerity with which 
the Grand Vizier professed his friendship for 
England. All through those weeks of August 
and September this confidence appeared to con- 
tinue unabated. The Moderate party in Tur- 
key — that is to say, the hoodwinking party — 
were reported to be daily gaining strength, and 
it was most important that the Allies should 
give them every assistance, and above all not 
precipitate matters. All was going well : all we ' 
had to do was to wait. So we waited, still 
blindly confident in the sincerity of Turkey's 
friendship for England, while the mobilisation 
of the Turkish forces proceeded merrily. By 
the end of September this was nearly complete, 
and quite suddenly the Ambassador informed 
the Foreign Office that Turkey appeared to be 
temporising. That was perfectly true, but the 
period of temporisation was nearly over, and 
by mid-October Turkey had something like 
800,000 men under arms, and for nine weeks 
Enver Pasha had had his signed treaty with 
Germany in his pocket. Possibly this diplo- 
matic procrastination was useful to us, for it 
enabled us to bring troops from India in se- 
curity, and send others to Egypt. But without 
doubt it was useful to the Turks, for it enabled 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 157 

them to mobilise their armies, and to strengthen 
enormously the defences of the Dardanelles. 
Then came the day when Germany and Turkey 
were ready, the attack was made on Odessa, and 
out of Constantinople we went. We climbed 
into the railway carriages that took the last rays 
of English influence out of the Ottoman Empire, 
and steep were the stairs in the house of a 
stranger ! Turks are not much given to laugh- 
ter, but Enver Pasha must at least have smiled 
on that day. 

Already, of course, German influence was 
strong in the army, which now was thoroughly 
trained in German methods, but that army 
might still be called a Turkish army. Nowa- 
days, by no stretch of language can it be called 
Turkish except in so far that all Turkish effi- 
cient manhood is helplessly enlisted in it, for 
there is no branch or department of it over 
which the Prussian octopus has not thrown its 
paralysing tentacles and affixed its immovable 
suckers. Army and navy alike, the wireless sta- 
tions, the submarines, the aircraft, are all di- 
rectly controlled from Berlin, and, as we have 
seen, the generalissimo of the forces is Macken- 
sen, who is absolutely the Hindenburg of the 
East. But thorough as is the control of Berlin 
over Constantinople in military and naval mat- 



158 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

— «— — — i i n i n — «— — i —————— — — —— — 1 

ters, it is not one whit more thorough than her 
control in all other matters of national life. 
Never before has Germany Been very success- 
ful in her colonisation; but if complete domi- 
nation — the sucking of a country till it is a mere 
rind of itself, and yet at the same time full to 
bursting of Prussian ichor — may be taken as 
Germany's equivalent of colonisation, then in- 
deed we must be forced to recognise her success. 
And it was all done in the name and for the sake 
of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Even now Prussian 
Pecksniffs like Herr Ernst Marre, whose pam- 
phlet, Die TitrJcen und Wir nach dem Kriege, 
was published in 1916, continue to insist that 
Germany is nobly devoting herself to the well- 
being of Turkey. "In doing this," he exclaims 
in that illuminating document, "we are benefit- 
ing Turkey. . . . This is a war of liberation for 
Turkey," though omitting to say from whom 
Turkey is being liberated. Perhaps the Ar- 
menians. Occasionally, it is true, he forgets 
that, and naively remarks,. "Turkey is a very 
difficult country to govern. But after the war 
Turkey will be very important as a transit coun- 
try." But then he remembers again and says, 
"We wish to give besides taking, and we should 
often like to give more than we can hope to 
give." Let us look into this, and see the ma&- 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 159 

ner in which Germany expresses her yearning 
to impoverish herself for the sake of Turkey. 

All this reorganisation of the Turkish army 
was of course a very expensive affair, and re- 
quired skilful financing, and it was necessary 
to get the whole of Turkey's exchequer arrange- 
ments into German hands. A series of financial 
regulations was promulgated. The Finance 
Minister, during 1916, was still Turkish, but the 
official immediately under him was a German. 
He was authorised to deposit with the Con- 
trollers of the Ottoman National Debt German 
Imperial Bills of £T30,000,000, and to issue Ger- 
man paper money to the like amount. This ar- 
rangement insures the circulation of the Ger- 
man notes, which are redeemable by Turkey in 
gold two years after the declaration of peace. 
Gold is declared to be the standard currency, 
and no creditor is obliged to accept in payment 
of a debt more than 300 piastres in silver or fifty 
in nickel. And since there is no gold in cur- 
rency (for it has been all called in, and penalties 
of death have been authorised for hoarders) it 
follows that this and other issues of German 
paper will filter right through the Empire. At 
the same time a German expert, Dr. Kautz, was 
appointed to start banks throughout Turkey in 
order to free the peasants from the Turkish vil- 



160 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

lage usurer, and in consequence enslave them to 
the German banks. Similarly a German was 
put at the head of the Ottoman Agricultural 
Bank. These new branches worked very well, 
but it is pleasant to think that one such was 
started by the Deutsche Bank at Bagdad in Oc- 
tober 1916, which now has its shutters up. Be- 
fore this, as we learn from the ester reichischer 
Volkswirt (June 1916), Germany had issued 
other gold notes, in payment for gold from Tur- 
key, which is retainable in Berlin till six months 
after the end of the war. (It is reasonable to 
wonder whether it will not be retained rather 
longer than that.) These gold notes were ac- 
cepted willingly at first by the public, but the 
increase in their number (by the second issue) 
has caused them to be viewed with justifiable 
suspicion, and the depreciation in them con- 
tinues. But the Turkish public has no redress 
except by hoarding gold, which is a penal of- 
fence. That these arrangements have not par- 
ticularly helped Turkish credit may be gathered 
from the fact that the Turkish gold £1, nomi- 
nally 100 piastres, was very soon worth 280 
piastres in the German paper standard, and it 
now fetches a great deal more. 

Again, the Deutsche Orientbank has made 
many extensions, and is already financing cot- 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 161 

ton and wool trade for after the war. The es- 
tablishment of this provoked much applause in 
German financial circles, who find it to be an 
instance of the "far-reaching and powerful Ger- 
mano-Austrian unity, which replaces the dis- 
union of Turkish finance. ' ' This is profoundly- 
true, especially if we omit the word "Austrian' ' 
inserted for diplomatic reasons. Again we find 
Germany advancing £3,000,000 of German paper 
to the Turkish Government in January 1917, 
for the payment of supplies they have received 
from Krupp's works and (vaguely) for inter- 
est to the German Financial Minister. This, 
too, we may conjecture, is to be redeemed after 
the war in gold. 

In March of this year we find in the report of 
the Ottoman Bank a German loan of £1,000,000 
for the purchase of agricultural implements by 
Turkey, and this is guaranteed by house-taxes. 
In all up to that month, as was announced in 
the Chamber of Deputies at Constantinople, 
Germany had advanced to Turkey the sum of 
£142,000,000, entirely, it would seem, in German 
paper, to be repaid at various dates in gold. 
The grip, in fact, is a strangle-hold, all for Tur- 
key's good, as no doubt will prove the "New 
Conventions" announced by Zimmermann in 
May 1917, to take the place of the abolished 



162 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

Capitulations, " which left Turkey at the mercy 
of predatory Powers who looked for the dis- 
ruption of the Ottoman Empire." Herr Zim- 
mermann does not look for that: he looks for 
its absorption. And sees it. 

The industrial development of Turkey by this 
benevolent and disinterested Power has been 
equally thorough and far-reaching, though Ger- 
many here has had a certain amount of compe- 
tition by Hungary to contend against, for Hun- 
gary considered that Germany was trespassing 
on her sphere of interest. But she has been able 
to make no appreciable headway against her 
more acute partner, and her application for a 
monopoly of sugar-production was not favour- 
ably received, for Germany already had taken 
the beet industry well in hand. In Asia Minor 
the acreage of cultivation early in 1917 had 
fallen more than 50 per cent, from that under 
crops before the war, but owing to the importa- 
tion of machinery from the Central Powers, 
backed up by a compulsory Agricultural Service 
Law, which has just been passed, it is hoped 
that the acreage will be increased this year by 
something like 30 per cent. The yield per acre 
also will be greatly increased this year, for Ger- 
many has, though needing artificial manures 
badly herself, sent tege quantities into Turkey, 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 163 



where they will be more profitably employed. 
She has no fear about securing the produce. 
This augmented yield will, it is true, not be ade- 
quate to supply the needs of Turkey, who for 
the last two years has suffered from very acute 
food shortage, which in certain districts has 
amounted to famine and wholesale starvation 
of the poorer classes. But it is unlikely that 
their needs will be considered at all, for Ger- 
many's needs (she, fhe fairy godmother of the 
Pan-Turk ideal) must obviously have the first 
call on such provisions as are obtainable. Thus, 
in the new preserved meat factory at Aidin, the 
whole of the produce is sent to Germany. Thus, 
too, though in February 1917 there was a daily 
shortage in Smyrna of 700 sacks of flour, and 
the Arab and Greek population was starving, no 
flour at all was allowed to be imported into 
Smyrna. But simultaneously Germany was 
making huge purchases of fish, meat, and flour 
in Constantinople (paid for in German paper), 
including 100,000 sheep. Yet such was the vil- 
lainous selfishness of the famine-stricken folk at 
Adrianople that, when the trains containing 
these supplies were passing through, a mob held 
them up and sold the contents to the inhabitants. 
That, however, was an isolated instance, and 
in any case a law was passed in October 1916, 



164 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

■ . I i i m a 

_ 1 

appointing a military commission to control all 
supplies. It enacts that troops shall be supplied 
first, and specially ordains that the require- 
ments of German troops come under this head. 
(Private firms have been expressly prohibited 
from purchasing these augmented wheat sup- 
plies, but special permission was given in 1915 
to German and Austro-Hungarian societies to 
buy.) A few months later we find that there 
are a hundred deaths daily in Constantinople 
from starvation, and two hundred in Smyrna, 
where there is a complete shortage of oil. But 
oil is still being sent to Germany, and during 
1916 five hundred reservoirs of oil were sent 
there, each containing up to 15,000 kilogrammes. 
Similarly during this summer the price of fruit 
has gone up in Smyrna, for the Germans have 
reopened certain factories for preserving it and 
turning it into jam, which is being sent to Ger- 
many. The sugar is supplied from the new beet- 
fields of Konia. But Kultur must be supplied 
first, else Kultur would grow lean, and the Turk- 
ish God of Love will look after the Smyrniotes. 
It is no wonder that the blockade of Germany 
does not produce the desired result a little 
quicker, for food is already pouring in from 
Turkey, and when the artificial manures have 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 165 

produced their early harvest the stream will 
become a torrent. 1 

But during all these busy and tremendous 
months of war Germany has not only been de- 
nuding Turkey of her food supplies, for the 
sake of the Pan-Turkish ideal; in the same al- 
truistic spirit she has been vastly increasing the 
productiveness of her new and most important 
colony. The great irrigation works at Konia, 
begun several years ago, are in operation, and 
the revenues of the irrigated villages have been 
doubled. In fact, as the report lately issued 
says, "a new and fertile province has been 
formed by the aid of German energy and knowl- 
edge. ' ' At Adana are similar irrigation works, 
financed by the Deutsche Bank. Ernst Marre 
gives us a most hopeful survey of them, for 
Adana was already linked up with the Bagdad 
Eailway in October 1916, which was to be the 
great artery connecting Germany with the East. 
There is some considerable shortage of labour 
[there (owing in part to the Armenian massacres, 
to which we shall revert presently), but the 
financial arrangements are in excellent shape. 
The whole of the irrigation works are in Ger- 
man hands, and have been paid for by Ger- 
man paper ; and to get the reservoirs, etc., back 

1 The harvest has now come in, and is most abundant. 



166 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

? ■ . - ■ ' ' 

into her own control, it has been agreed that 
Turkey, already completely bankrupt, will have 
to pay not only what has been spent, but a hand- 
some sum in compensation; while, as regards 
shortage of labour, prisoners have been released 
in large numbers to work without pay. This ir- 
rigation scheme at Adana will increase the cot- 
ton yield by four times the present crop, so we 
learn from the weekly Arab magazine, El Alem 
el Ismali, which tells us also of the electric- 
power stations erected there. 

The same paper (October 1916) announces to 
the Anatolian merchants that transport is now 
easy, owing to the arrival of engines and trucks 
from Germany, while Die Zeit (February 1917) 
prophesies a prosperous future for this Ger- 
mano-Turkish cotton combine. Hitherto Tur- 
key has largely imported cotton from England ; 
now Turkey — thanks to German capital on 
terms above stated — will, in the process of in- 
ternal development so unselfishly devised for 
her by Germany, grow cotton for herself, and 
be kind enough to give a preferential tariff to 
Germany. 

A similarly bright future may be predicted 
for the sugar-beet industry at Konia, where are 
the irrigation works already referred to. Ar- 
tesian wells have been sunk, and there is the 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 167 

suggestion to introduce Bulgarian labour in de- 
fault of Turkish. As we have seen, Hungary 
attempted to obtain a monopoly with regard to 
sugar, but Germany has been victorious on this 
point (as on every other where she competes 
with Hungary), and has obtained the concession 
for a period of thirty years. She reaped the 
first-fruits this last spring (1917), when, on a 
single occasion, 350 trucks laden with sugar 
were despatched to Berlin. A similar irrigation 
scheme is bringing into cultivation the Maki- 
schelin Valley, near Aleppo, and Herr Wied has 
been appointed as expert for irrigation plant in 
Syria. There has been considerable shortage 
of coal, but now more is arriving from the Black 
Sea, and the new coal-fields at Eodosto will soon 
be giving an output. 

Indeed, it would be easier to enumerate the 
industries and economical developments of 
Turkey over which Germany has not at the pres- 
ent moment got the control than those over 
which she has. In particular she has shown a 
parental interest in Turkish educational ques- 
tions. She established last year, under Ger- 
man management, a school for the study of Ger- 
man in Constantinople ; she has put under the 
protection of the German Government the Jew- 
ish institution at Haifa for technical education 



168 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 






in Palestine; from Sivas a mission of school- 
masters has been sent to Germany for the stndy 
of German methods. Ernst Marre surmises 
that German will donbtless become compulsory 
even in the Turkish intermediate (secondary) 
schools. In April 1917, the first stone of the 
' ' House of Friendship" was laid at Constanti- 
nople, the object of which institution is to create 
among Turkish students an interest in every- 
thing German, while earlier in the year arrange- 
ments were made for 10,000 Turkish youths to 
go to Germany to be taught trades. These I 
imagine were unfit for military service. With 
regard to such a scheme Halil Haled Bey praises 
the arrangement for the education of Turks in 
Germany. When they used to go to France, he 
tells us, "they lost their religion' ' (certainly 
Prussian Gott is nearer akin to Turkish Allah) 
* ' and returned home unpatriotic and useless. In 
Germany they will have access to suitable re- 
ligious literature' ' (Gott!) " and must adopt all 
they see good in German methods without losing 
their original characteristics." Comment on 
this script is needless. The hand is the hand of 
Halil Haled Bey, but the voice is the voice of 
Potsdam. Occasionally, but rarely, Austrian 
competition is seen. Professor Schmoller, in an 
Austrian quarterly review, shows jealousy of 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 169 

German influence, and we find, in October 1916, 
an Ottoman- Austrian college started at Vienna 
for 250 pupils of the Ottoman Empire. But Ger- 
many has 10,000 in Berlin. At Adana (where 
are the German irrigation works) the German- 
Turkish Society has opened a German school 
of 300, while, reciprocally, courses in Turkish 
have been organised at Berlin for the sake of 
future German colonists. In Constantinople the 
Tcmin announces a course of lectures to be held 
by the Turco-German Friendship Society. Pro- 
fessor von Marx discoursed last April on for- 
eign influence and the development of nations, 
with special reference to Turkey and the par- 
allel case of Germany. A few months later we 
find Hilmet Nazim Bey, official head of the Turk- 
ish press, proceeding to Berlin to learn German 
press methods. A number of editors of Turkish 
papers will follow him, and soon, no doubt, the 
Turkish press will rival Cologne and Frankfort. 
So much for German education, but her pene- 
trative power extends into every branch of in- 
dustry and economics. In November 1916, a 
Munich expert was put in charge of the College 
of Forestry, and an economic society was started 
in Constantinople on German lines with German 
instructors. Inoculation against small-pox, ty- 
phoid, and cholera was made compulsory; and 



170 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

mmmm ^ mm ■ — — mmm i — — — — — m 

we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of 
Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of 
them, have Germans as their acting Ministers. 
In the same year a German was appointed as 
expert for silkworm breeding and for the culti- 
vation of beet. Practically all the railways in 
Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right 
of purchase. Germany owns the Anatolian rail- 
way concession (originally British), with right 
to build to Angora and Konia ; the Bagdad rail- 
way concession, with preferential rights over 
minerals ; they have bought the Mersina-Adana 
Railway, with right of linking up to the Bagdad 
Railway ; they have bought the Smyrna-Cassaba 
Railway, built with French capital. They have 
secured also the Haidar Pasha Harbour con- 
cession, thereby controlling and handling all 
merchandise arriving at railhead from the in- 
terior of Asia Minor. 1 Already on the Bagdad 
Railway the big tunnels of Taurus and Amanus 

1 The balance-sheets for 1916 of certain of those railways in 
which the Deutsche Bank has an interest have come to hand. 
They show a very disagreeable degree of prosperity. The 
Anatolia Eailway Company has large profits with a gross rev- 
enue of 25,737,995 marks. The profit on the Haidar-Pasha- 
Angora Line has risen from 42,566 francs per kilometre to 
45,552. The Mersina-Tarsus-Adana Eailway has paid 6 per 
cent, on its preference shares, and 3. per cent, on its ordinary 
shares. The Haidar Pasha Harbour Company has paid 8 per 
cent. 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 171 

w— — — i — —■— — — —fa—— — — — — — — — if 

, , — ■ ..,- i , ■ ■■■■,,-■ ... ■ -■ — a 

are available for narrow-gauge petrol-driven 
motors, and the broad-gauge line will soon be 
complete. Meanwhile railway construction is 
pushed on in all directions under German con- 
trol, and the Turkish Minister of Finance (Au- 
gust 1916) allocated a large sum of German 
paper money for the construction of ordinary 
roads, military roads, local government roads, 
all of which are new to Turkey, but which will 
be useful for the complete German occupation 
which is being swiftly consolidated. To stop the 
mouths of the people, all political clubs have 
been suppressed by the Minister of the Interior, 
for Prussia does not care for criticism. To sup- 
ply German ammunition needs, lead and zinc 
have been taken from the roofs of mosques and 
door-handles from mosque-gates, and the iron 
railings along the Champs de Mars at Pera have 
been carted away for the manufacture of bombs. 
Not long after eight truck-loads of copper were 
sent to Germany: these, I imagine, represent 
the first produce of copper roofs and utensils. 
A Turco-German convention signed in Berlin in 
January of this year, permits subjects of one 
country to settle in the other while retaining 
their nationality and enjoying trading and other 
privileges. In Lebanon Dr. Konig has opened 
an agricultural school for Syrians of all relig- 



172 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

ions. In the Horns district the threatening 
plague of locusts in February 1917 was com- 
bated by Germans; and a German expert, Dr. 
Bucher, had been already sent to superintend 
the whole question. For this concerns supplies 
to Germany, as does also the ordinance passed 
in the same month that two-thirds of all fish 
caught in the Lebanon district should be given 
to the military authorities (these are German), 
and that every fish weighing over six ounces in 
the Beirut district should be Korban also. The 
copper mines at Arghana Maden, near Diar- 
bekr, are busy exporting their produce into Ger- 
many ; the coal-mines at Rodosto will very soon 
be making a large output. 1 

There is no end to this penetration : German 
water-seekers, with divining and boring appa- 
ratus, accompanied the Turkish expedition into 
Sinai ; Russian prisoners were sent by Germany 
for agricultural work in Asia Minor, to take 
the place of slaughtered Armenians ; a German- 
Turkish treaty, signed January 11, 1917, gives 
the whole reorganisations of the economic sys- 
tem to a special German mission. A Stuttgart 
journal chants a characteristic Lobgesang 
over this feat. "That is how," it proudly ex- 

1 Later in this year we find three trains daily leaving Con- 
stantinople for Germany, laden with coal and military supplies. 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 173 

claims, "we work for the liberation of peoples 
and nationalities." 

In the same noble spirit, we must suppose, 
German legal reforms were introduced in De- 
cember 1916, to replace the Turkish Shuriat, and 
in the same month all the Turks in telegraph 
offices in Constantinople were replaced by Ger- 
mans. Ernst Marre gives valuable advice to 
young Germans settling in Turkey. He par- 
ticularly recommends them, knowing how re- 
ligion is one of the strongest bonds in this mur- 
derous race, to "trade in articles of devotion, 
in rosaries, in bags to hold the Koran," and 
points out what good business might be built 
up in gramophones. Earlier in this year we 
find a "German Oriental Trading Company' ' 
founded for the import of fibrous materials for 
needs of military authorities, and a great car- 
pet business established at Urfa with German 
machinery that will supplant the looms of 
Smyrna. A saltpetre factory is established at 
Konia by Herr Toepfer, whose enterprise is re- 
warded with an Iron Cross and a Turkish deco- 
ration. The afforestation near Constantinople, 
ordered by the Ministry of Agriculture, is put 
into German hands, and in the vilayet of Aidin 
(April 1916) ninety concessions were granted 
% German capitalists to undertake the exploita- 



174 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

tion of metallic ores. Occasionally the German 
octopus finds it has gone too far for the moment, 
and releases some struggling limb of its victim, 
as, for instance, when we see that, in September 
1916, the German Director's stamp for the " Im- 
perial German Great Radio Station" at Damas- 
cus has been discarded temporarily, as that sta- 
tion "should be treated for the present as a 
Turkish concern.' ' 

A "Trading and Weaving Company" was es- 
tablished at Angora in 1916, an "Import and 
Export Company" at Smyrna, "a Trading and 
Industrial Society" at Beirut, a "Tobacco Trad- 
ing Company" at Latakieh, an "Agricultural 
Company" at Tripoli, a "Corn Exporting Com- 
pany" in Lebanon, a "Rebuilding Commission" 
(perhaps for sacked Armenian houses) at 
Konia. More curious yet will be a Tourist's 
Guide Book — a Baedeker, in fact — for travellers 
in Anatolia, and the erection of a monument in 
honour of Turkish women who have replaced 
men called up for military duty. Truly these 
last two items — a guide-book for Anatolia, and 
a monument to women — are strange enterprises 
for Turks. A new Prussian day is dawning, it 
seems, for Turkish women as well, for the Tanin 
(April 1917) tells us that diplomas are to be 
conferred on ladies who have completed their 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 175 

studies in the Technical School at Constanti- 
nople. 

It is needless to multiply instances of German 
penetration: I have but given the skeleton of 
this German monster that has fastened itself 
with tentacles and suckers on every branch of 
Turkish industry. There is none round which 
it has not cast its feelers — no Semitic money- 
lender ever obtained a surer hold on his victim. 
In matters naval, military, educational, legal, 
industrial, financial, Germany has a strangle- 
hold. Turkey's life is already crushed out of 
her, and, as we have seen, it has been crushed 
out of her by the benevolent Kultur-mongers, 
who, among all the Great Powers of Europe, in- 
vested their time and their money in the achieve- 
ment of the Pan-Turkish ideal. Silently and 
skilfully they worked, bamboozling their chief 
tool, Enver Pasha, even as Enver Pasha bam- 
boozled us. As long as he was of service to 
them they retained him ; for his peace of mind 
at one time they stopped up all letter-boxes in 
Constantinople because so many threatening let- 
ters were sent him. But now Enver Pasha 
seems to have had his day; he became a little 
autocratic, and thought that he was the head of 
the Pan-Turkish ideal. So he was, but the Pan- 
Turkish ideal had become Pan-Prussian, and 



176 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

i— — — — — — — — ^— ^—— — — ■— — 

he had not noticed the transformation. Talaat 
Bey has taken his place ; it was he who, in May 
1917, was received by the Emperor William, by 
King Ludwig, and by the Austrian Emperor, 
and he who was the mouthpiece of the German 
efforts to make a separate peace with Russia. 
Under Czardom, he proclaimed, the existence 
of Turkey was threatened, but now the revolu- 
tion has made friendship possible, for Russia 
no longer desires territorial annexation. And, 
oh, how Turkey would like to be Russia 's friend ! 
Enver Pasha has of late been somewhat out of 
favour in Berlin, and I cannot but think it curi- 
ous that when, on April 2, 1917, he visited the 
submarine base at Wilhelmshaven, he was very 
nearly killed in a motor accident. But it may 
have been an accident. Since then I cannot find 
that he has taken any more active part in Pan- 
Turkish ideals than to open a soup-kitchen in 
some provincial town, and lecture the Central 
Committee of the Young Turks on the subject 
of internal affairs in Great Britain. I do not 
like lectures, but I should have liked to hear that 
one. 

I have left to the end of this chapter the ques- 
tion of Germany's knowledge of, and complicity 
in the Armenian massacres. From the tribune 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 177 

of the Eeichstag, on January 15, 1916, there was 
made a definite denial of the existence of such 
massacres at all; on another subsequent occa- 
sion it was stated that Germany could not in- 
terfere in Turkish internal affairs. 

In view of the fact that there is no internal 
affair appertaining to Turkey in which Ger- 
many has not interfered, the second of these 
statements may be called insincere. But the de- 
nial of the massacres is a deliberate lie. Ger- 
many — official Germany — knew all about them, 
and she permitted them to go on. A few proofs 
of this are here shortly stated. 

(1) In September 1915, four months before 
the denial of the massacres was made in the 
Eeichstag, Dr. Martin Niepage, higher grade 
teacher in the German Technical School at 
Aleppo, prepared and sent, as we have seen, in 
his name, and that of several of his colleagues, 
a report of the massacres to the German Em- 
bassy at Constantinople. In that report he gives 
a terrible account of what he has seen with his 
own eyes, and also states that the country 
Turks ' explanation with regard to the origin of 
these measures is that it was "the teaching of 
the Germans.' ' The German Embassy at Con- 
stantinople therefore knew of the massacres, 
and knew also that the Turks attributed them 



178 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

to orders from Germany. Dr. Niepage also con- 
sulted, before sending his report, with the Ger- 
man Consul at Aleppo, Herr Hoffman, who told 
him that the German Embassy had been already 
advised in detail about the massacres from the 
consulates at Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Mosul, 
but that he welcomed a further protest on the 
subject. 

(2) These reports, or others like them, had 
not gone astray, for in August 1915, the German 
Ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Wangen- 
heim, made a formal protest to the Turkish Gov- 
ernment about the massacres. 

There is, then, no doubt that the German 
Government, when it officially denied the mas- 
sacres, was perfectly cognisant of them. It was 
also perfectly capable of stopping them, for they 
were not local violences, but wholesale murders 
organised at Constantinople. In support of this 
view I find an independent witness stating that 
"there is no Turk of standing who will not 
readily declare that it would have been per- 
fectly possible for Germany to have vetoed the 
massacres had she chosen.' ' Germany had in- 
deed already given assurances that such mas- 
sacres should not occur. She had assured the 
Armenian Katholikos at Adana that so long as 
Germany has any influence in Turkey he need 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 179 

not fear a repetition of the horrors that had 
taken place tinder Abdul Hatmid. Had she, 
then, no influence in Constantinople, or how was 
it that she had obtained complete control over 
all Turkish branches of government? The same 
assurance was given by the German Ambassa- 
dor in April 1915, to the Armenian Patriarch 
and the President of the Armenian National 
Council. 

So, in support of the Pan-Turkish ideal, and 
in the name of the Turkish Allah, the God of 
Love, Germany stood by and let the infamous 
tale of lust and rapine and murder be told to its 
end. The Turks had planned to exterminate the 
whole Armenian race except some half -million, 
who would be deported penniless to work on 
agricultural developments under German rule, 
but this quality of Turkish mercy was too 
strained for Major Pohl, who proclaimed that 
it was a mistake to spare so many. But he was 
a soldier, and did not duly weigh the claims of 
agriculture. 

The choice was open to Germany; Germany 
chose, and let the Armenian massacres go on. 
But she was in a difficulty. "What if the Turk- 
ish Government retorted (perhaps it did so re- 
tort), "You are not consistent. Why do you 
mind about the slaughter of a few Armenians? 



180 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

What about Belgium and your atrocities 
there f" 

And all the ingenuity of the Wilhelmstrasse 
would not be able to find an answer to that. 

I do not say that Germany wanted the mas- 
sacres, for she did not. She wanted more agri- 
cultural labour, and I think that, if only for 
that reason, she deprecated them. But she al- 
lowed them to go on when it was in her power 
to stop them, and all the perfumes of Arabia 
will not wash clean her hand from that stinking 
horror. 

Here, then, are some of the problems which 
those who, at the end of the war, will have to 
deal with the problem of Turkey must tackle. 
It is just as well to recognise that at the pres- 
ent moment Turkey is virtually and actually a 
German colony, and the most valuable colony 
that Germany has ever had. It will not be 
enough to limit, or rather abolish, the supremacy 
of Turkey over aliens and martyrised peoples ; 
it will be necessary first to abolish the suprem- 
acy of Germany over Turkey. To do this the 
victory of our Allied Nations must be complete, 
and Germany's octopus envelopment of Turkish 
industries severed. Otherwise we shall imme- 
diately be confronted with a Germany that al- 
ready reaches as far as Mesopotamia. That is 



DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLAH 181 

done now; and that, before there can come any 
permanent peace for Europe, must be undone. 
Nothing less than the complete release of that 
sucker and tentacle embrace will suffice. 

Note 

As throwing a sidelight on the German complicity in 
the Armenian massacres, the following is of interest. 
It is known that when Metternich succeeded Wangen- 
heim as German Ambassador in Constantinople, he 
brought with him a speech, written in Berlin, which, 
by the Kaiser's orders, he was to read when present- 
ing his credentials to the Sultan. This contained a 
sentence which implied that Germany had been un- 
able to stop the Armenian massacres. Talaat refused 
to allow the speech to be read, obviously because it 
threw the responsibility of the massacres on to the 
Turks, whereas the accepted opinion in Turkey was 
that they took place with the connivance and even at 
the instigation of the Germans. Eventually a com- 
promise was arrived at, and the speech in toto was 
read privately, the part referring to the Armenian 
massacre not being published. . . , It is a pity that 
Germany is always found out. . . . 



CHAPTEE VI 

"Thy Kingdom Is Divided" 

Let us commit the crime of lese-majeste, and 
assume (though the Emperor Wilhelm n. has 
repeatedly announced to the contrary) that Ger- 
many is not at the conclusion of the European 
War to find herself in possession of the world. 
She has prepared her plans in anticipation of 
the auspicious event ; in fact she has had a most 
interesting map of Europe produced which, ex- 
cept by its general shape, is scarcely recognis- 
able. The printing of it, it is true, was a little 
premature, for it shows what Europe was to 
have been like in 1916, and the apportionments 
are not borne out by facts. But assuming that 
there is some radical error about it all from 
her point of view, and assuming that there will 
not be either a conclusive peace favourable to 
Prussian interests, or even an inconclusive 
peace, but one in which the Allies will be able 
to dictate and enforce their own terms, the mag- 
nitude of the problems that will await their de- 
cision may well appal the most ingenious of 

182 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 188 

their statesmen. And of all those problems 
none, it is safe to prophesy, will be found more 
difficult of solution than that which will deal 
with the future of the corrupt and barbarous 
Government which has for centuries made hell 
of the Ottoman Empire. We know more or less 
what will happen to Alsace and Lorraine, to 
Belgium, to the Trentino, because in those cases 
the claims of one or other of our Allies to de- 
mand a particular settlement are quite certain 
to be agreed to by those not so immediately and 
vitally concerned. But in the Balkans these 
problems will be more complicated because of 
conflicting interests, and most complicated of 
all will they be in Turkey. One thing, however, 
is certain, that there can be no going back to 
the conditions that existed there before the war. 
Ever since the Osmanlis came out of remoter 
Asia into the Nearer East and into Europe, the 
government of their Empire has gone from bad 
to worse. In the early days, as we have seen, 
their policy was to absorb the strength of their 
subject peoples by incorporating the youth of 
them into the Turkish army, by giving them 
Turkish wives, and by converting them to Mo- 
hammedanism. Such was the foundation of the 
Empire and such its growth. But having ab- 
sorbed their strength, the Sultan's Government 



184 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

neglected them until they milked them again. 
They were allowed to prosper if they could: all 
that was demanded of them was a toll of their 
strength. They were cattle, and for the right 
to graze on Turkish lands they paid back a pail 
of their milk of manhood. But an empire 
founded on such principles contains within it 
active and prolific seeds of decay, and, as we 
have seen, more stringent measures had to be 
resorted to in order to preserve the supremacy 
of the ruling people. Instead of absorbing 
their strength, Abdul Hamid hit upon the new 
method of killing them, so that the Turks should 
still maintain their domination. And the policy 
set on foot by him was developed but a few years 
ago into a scheme of slaughter, which in atrocity 
has far surpassed the killings of Attila, of whom 
the Nationalist poet sings, or even the designs 
of the deposed Sultan. The Armenian nation, 
with the exception of such part of it as has es- 
caped into Russian territory, has been extermi- 
nated, and similar measures have been planned 
and indeed begun, against the Greeks, the 
Arabs, and the Jews. 

In consequence of this, in consequence also of 
the European War, the policy of the Balance of 
Power as regards Turkey has been at length 
abandoned. The Allies have definitely declared 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 185 

in their joint note to President Wilson their 
aims in the war, and for those they have pledged 
themselves to fight nntil final and complete vic- 
tory wreathes their arms. Among these aims 
are: — 

(1) The liberation of the peoples who now lie 
beneath the murderous tyranny of the Turks. 

(2) The expulsion from Europe of the Otto- 
man Empire, which has proved itself so radi- 
cally alien to Western civilisation. 

For a century that most inharmonious of or- 
chestras called the Concert of Europe has, owing 
to the exigencies of the Balance of Power, kept 
Turkey together, and in particular has main- 
tained the centre of its government at Constan- 
tinople simply because the Balance of Power 
would be upset if anybody else held the key of 
the straits that separate Eussia from the Medi- 
terranean. England, above all others, was in- 
strumental in preserving that precarious Bal- 
ance, and England now must confess the utter 
failure of her policy there throughout a cen- 
tury. It is humiliating to acknowledge the com- 
plete collapse of that which for so many decades 
has been the keystone of our ruling with regard 
to our Eastern Empire, but the arch has col- 
lapsed; Germany pulled the keystone out, and 
all our efforts to exclude Eussia from free ac- 



186 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 



oess to the Mediterranean have only resulted in 
letting Germany in. To-day she holds Constan- 
tinople, and the bitter pill must be swallowed. 
The situation, as it stands at this moment, is. 
infinitely worse than it could have been for a 
century back, if at any moment during those 
hundred years we had done what we always 
ought to have done, and declared that the an- 
achronism of Turkey being in Europe was more 
intolerable than anything that could happen in 
consequence of her expulsion. But we have ac- 
knowledged that now. We have also acknowl- 
edged the even greater anachronism of Turkey 
being allowed to dispose of the destinies of any 
of those peoples who inhabit the territories of 
the Ottoman Empire, for the Allies, in their 
joint Note, have declared that the remedy of 
these two monstrous abuses forms an essential 
part of their aim in the war, which in costliness 
of life and of treasure has already far exceeded 
any cataclysm that could have come to Europe 
through its doing its clear and Christian duty 
with regard to Turkey during the preceding 
hundred years. And among the benefits which 
eventually mankind will reap in the fields that 
have been sown by the blood of the slain will be 
the fact that the Confusion of Europe will have 
accomplished a task which the Concert of Eu- 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 187 

rope was too craven of consequences to under- 
take; and Constantinople and the subject peo- 
ples of the Turks will have passed from the 
yoke of that murderous tyranny for ever. 

We will take these two avowed aims of the 
Allies in order, and first try to draw (though 
with diffident pencil) some sketch of what will 
be the confines of the Ottoman Empire, when we 
pluck the fruits of the great crusade against the 
barbarism of Turkey and of Germany. It is 
quite useless to attempt to keep the map as it 
was, and peg out claims within the Empire 
where we shall proclaim that Arabs and Greeks 
and Armenians shall live in peace, for it is ex- 
actly that plan which has formed a century's 
failure. At the International Congress of Ber- 
lin, for instance, a solemn pact was entered into 
by Turkey for the reform of the Armenian vila- 
yets. She carried out her promise by slaughter- 
ing every Armenian male, and outraging every 
Armenian woman who inhabited them. The soi- 
disant protectorate of Crete was not a whit more 
successful in securing for the Cretans a toler- 
able existence, and the Allies had to bring it 
to an end twenty years ago, and free them from 
the execrable yoke; while finally the repudia- 
tion by Turkey of the Capitulations, which pro- 
vided some sort of guarantee for the safety of 



188 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

p i M ■ < 

foreign peoples in Turkey, has shown us, if fur- 
ther proof was needed, the value of covenants 
with the Osmanli. It must be rendered impos- 
sible for Turkey to repeat such outrages: the 
soil where her alien peoples dwell must be hers 
no more, and any Turkish aggression on that 
soil must be, ipso facto, ah act of war against 
the European Power under the protection of 
whom such a province is placed. 

The difficulty of this part of the problem is 
not so great as might at first appear. We do 
not, when we come to look at it in detail, find 
such a conflict of interests as would seem to 
face us on a general view. Even the precarious 
Balance of Power was not upset by a quantity 
of similar adjustments made by the Concert of 
Europe during the last hundred years. The 
Powers freed Serbia, giving Turkey first a 
suzerainty over her, and finally abolishing that : 
they freed Bulgaria, they freed Greece, Eastern 
Eumelia, Macedonia, Albania. But, as by some 
strange lapse of humanity, they always regarded 
the subject peoples of Turkey in Asia as more 
peculiarly Turkish, as if at the Bosporus a new 
moral geography began, and massacre in Asia 
was comparatively venial as compared with 
massacre in Europe. But now the Allies have 
said that there must be no more massacres in 



«THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 189 
r 1 , a 

Asia, nor any possibility of them. To secure 
this, it will be necessary to sever from Turkey 
the lands where the alien peoples dwell, and 
form autonomous provinces under the protec- 
torate of one or other of the allied nations. In 
most cases we shall find that there is a protect- 
ing Power more or less clearly indicated, whose 
sphere of interest is obviously concerned with 
one or other of these new and independent prov- 
inces. 

The alien race which for the last thirty years 
has suffered the most atrociously from Turkish 
inhumanity is that of the Armenians, and it is 
fitting to begin our belated campaign of libera- 
tion with it. If the reader will turn to the map 
at the end of this book, he will see that the dis- 
trict marked Armenia lies at the north-west cor- 
ner of the old Ottoman Empire, and extends 
across its frontiers into Eussian Trans-Cau- 
casia. That indicates the district which once 
was peopled by Armenians. To-day, owing to 
the various Armenian massacres, the latest of 
which, described in another chapter, was by far 
the most appalling, such part of Armenia as lies 
in the Ottoman Empire is practically, and prob- 
ably absolutely, depopulated of its Armenian 
inhabitants. Such as survive, apart from the 
women whose lives were spared on their pro- 



190 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

f essing Islamism and entering Turkish harems, 
have escaped beyond the Russian frontier, and 
are believed to number about a quarter of a 
million. In the meantime their homes have 
partly been destroyed and partly occupied by 
mouhadjirs from Thrace, and by the Kurds who 
were largely instrumental in butchering them. 
Their lands have been appropriated haphaz- 
ardly, by any who laid hands on them. 

Here the problem is of no great difficulty. The 
robber-tenants must be evicted, and the rem- 
nant of the Armenians repatriated. Without 
exception they escaped into Trans-Caucasia 
from villages and districts near the frontier, 
else they could never have escaped from the pur- 
suing Turks and Kurds. Naturally, this rem- 
nant of a people will not nearly suffice to fill their 
entire province, but in order to satisfy the 
claims of justice at all adequately, the whole 
district of Armenia, as Armenia was known be- 
fore its people were exterminated, must be am- 
putated by a clean cut out of the Ottoman Em- 
pire and placed, in an autonomous condition in 
a new protected province, which will include all 
the vilayets of Armenia. 

There is no doubt about a prosperous future 
for Armenia if this is done, and to do less than 
this would be to fail signally as regards the sol- 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 191 

emn promise made by the Allies when they 
stated to President Wilson their aims in the 
war. The Armenians have ever been a thrifty 
and industrious people, possessed of an inherent 
vitality which has withstood centuries of fiend- 
ish oppression. With facilities given them for 
their re-settlement, and with foreign protection 
to establish them, they will, beyond question, 
more than hold their own against the Kurds. As 
a nation they are, as we have seen, partly agri- 
cultural in their pursuits; but a considerable 
proportion of them (and these the more intelli- 
gent) are men of business, merchants, doctors, 
educationalists, and gravitate to towns. Con- 
stantinople, as we shall see, will be open to them 
again, where lately they numbered nearly as 
many as the entire remnant of their nation num- 
bers now ; so, too, will be the cities of Syria, of 
Palestine, and of Mesopotamia in the New Tur- 
key which we are attempting to sketch. They 
will probably not care to settle in the towns 
and districts that will remain in the hands of 
their late oppressors and murderers. 

In the work of their repatriation none will be 
more eager to help than the American mission- 
aries, who, at the time of the last massacre, as 
so often before, showed themselves so nobly 
disregardant of all personal danger and risk in 



192 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

doing their utmost for their murdered flock, and 
who have explicitly declared their intention of 
resuming their work. With regard to the evic- 
tion of Kurds that will be necessary, it must be 
remembered that the Kurd is a trespasser on 
the plains and towns of Armenia, and properly 
belongs to the mountains from which he was en- 
couraged to descend by the Turks for purposes 
of massacre. Out of those towns and plains he 
must go, either into the mountains of Armenia 
from whence he came, or over the frontier of 
Armenia into the New Turkey presently to be 
defined. He must, in fact, be deported, though 
not in the manner of the deportations at which 
he himself so often assisted. 

The Armenians who will thus be reinstated 
within the boundaries of their own territory, 
will be practically penniless and without any of 
the means or paraphernalia of life, and the nec- 
essary outlay on supplies for them, and the cost 
of their rehabilitation would naturally fall on 
the protecting Power. They will, however, be 
free from the taxes they have hitherto paid to 
the Turks, and it should not be difficult for them 
by means of taxes far less oppressive, to pay an 
adequate interest on the moneys expended on 
them. These would thus take the form of a very 
small loan, the whole of which could easily be 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 193 

repaid by the Armenians in the course of a gen- 
eration or so. Once back on their own soil, and 1 
free from Turkish tyranny and the possibility 
of it, they are bound to prosper, even as they 
have prospered hitherto in spite of oppressions 
and massacres up till the year 1915, when, as 
we have seen, the liberal and progressive Na- 
tionalists organised and executed the external-, 
nation from which so few escaped. 

It is hardly necessary to point out who the 
protecting Power would be in the case of the 
repatriated Armenians, for none but Eussia is 
either desirable or possible. With one side along 
the Eussian frontier of Trans-Caucasia, the 
New Armenia necessarily falls into the sphere 
of Eussian influence. 

It has been suggested that not only Armenia 
proper, but part of Cilicia should also become 
a district of the repatriated Armenians, with 
an outlet to the sea. But while it is true that 
complete compensation would demand this, since 
Zeitun and other districts in Cilicia were al- 
most pure Armenian settlements, I cannot think 
that such a restoration is desirable. For, in the 
first place, the extermination of the Zeitunlis (as 
carried out by Jemal the Great) was practically 
complete. All the men were slaughtered, and it 
does not seem likely that any of the women and 



194 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

girls who were deported reached the "agricul- 
tural colony" of Deir-el-Zor in the Arabian des- 
ert. It is therefore difficult to see of whom the 
repatriation would consist. In the second place, 
the New Armenia will be for several generations 
to come of an area more than ample for all the 
Armenians who have survived the flight into 
Russia, and it obviously will give them the best 
chance of corporate prosperity, if the whole of 
them are repatriated in a compact body rather 
than that a portion of them should be formed 
into a mere patch severed from their country- 
men by so large a distance. Another sphere of 
influence also will be operating near the borders 
of Cilicia, and to place the Armenians under two 
protecting Powers would have serious disad- 
vantages. In addition they never were a sea- 
going people, and I cannot see what object 
would be served by giving them a coast-board. 
In any case, if a coast-board was found neces- 
sary, the most convenient would be the coast- 
board of the Black Sea, lying adjacent to their 
main territory. 

If it seems clear that for New Armenia the 
proper protecting Power is Russia, it is no less 
clear that for the freed inhabitants of New Syria, 
Arabs and Greeks alike, the proper protecting 
Power is France. Historically France's con- 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 195 

nection with Syria dates from the time of the 
Crusades in 1099; it has never been severed, 
and of late years the ties between the two conn- 
tries have been both strengthened and multi- 
plied. The Treaties of Paris, of London, of San 
Stefano, and of Berlin have all recognised the 
affiliation; so, too, from an ecclesiastical stand- 
point, have the encyclicals of Leo xm. in 1888 
and 1898. Similarly, it was France who inter- 
vened in the Syrian massacres of 1845, who 
landed troops for the protection of the Maron- 
ites in 1860, and established a protectorate of 
the Lebanon there a few years later, which 
lasted np till the outbreak of the European War. 
France was the largest holder, as she was also 
the constructor, of Syrian railways, and the har- 
bour of Beirut, without doubt destined to be 
one of the most flourishing ports of the Eastern 
Mediterranean, was also a French enterprise. 
And perhaps more important than all these, as 
a link between Syria and France, has been the 
educational penetration which France has ef- 
fected there. What the American missionaries 
did for Armenia, France has done for Syria, 
and according to a recent estimate, of the 
65,000 children who attended European schools 
throughout Syria, not less than 40,000 attended 
French schools. When we consider that that 



196 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

proportion has been maintained for many years 
in Syria, it can be estimated how strong the in- 
tellectual bond between the Syrian and the 
French now is. The French language, simi- 
larly, is talked everywhere : it is as current as is 
modern Greek in ports of the Levant. 

In virtue of such claims few, if any, would 
dispute the title of France to be the protecting 
Power in the case of Syria. Here there will 
not be, as was the case with the Armenians, 
any work of repatriation to be done. Such 
devastation and depopulation as has been 
wrought by Jemal the Great, with hunger and 
disease to help him, was wrought on the spot, 
and, though it will take many years to heal the 
wounds inflicted by that barbaric plagiarist 
of Potsdam, it is exactly the deft and practical 
sympathy of the French with the race they 
have so long tended, which will most speedily 
bring back health to the Syrians. 

It will be with regard to the geographical 
limits of a French protectorate that most 
difficulty is likely to be experienced; there 
will also be points claiming careful solution, 
as will be seen later, with regard to railway 
control. Northwards and eastwards the 
natural delimitations seem clear enough: 
northwards French Syria would terminate 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 197 

with, and include, the province of Aleppo, 
eastwards the Syrian desert marks its practi- 
cal limits, the technical limit being supplied 
by the course of the Euphrates. But south- 
wards there is no such natural line of demar- 
cation; the Arab occupation stretches right 
down till it reaches the Hedjaz, which already 
has thrown off the Turkish yoke and, under 
the Shereef of Mecca, declared its independ- 
ence. Inset into this long strip of territory 
lies Palestine. 

Now to make one single French protectorate 
over this very considerable territory seems at 
first sight a large order, but the objections to 
any other course are many and insuperable. 
Should the line of French influence be drawn 
farther north than the Hedjaz, under what 
protection is the intervening territory to be 
left? At present it is Turkish, but inhabited 
by Arabs, and, unless the Allies revoke the 
fulness of their declaration not to leave alien 
peoples under the "murderous tyranny" of the 
Turks, Turkish it cannot remain. But both 
by geographical situation and by racial in- 
terest, it belongs to French-protected Syria, 
and there seems no answer to the question as 
to what sphere of influence it comes under if 
not under the French. Just as properly, if 



198 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

—n« — a n ■ i iiii n ii M i i n i ii i- n». i ia»^ mo—— — ■— 

we take this view of the question, the Sinaitic 
Peninsula, largely desert, would fall to Egypt, 
the French protectorate being denned west- 
wards at Akabah. That the Eastern side 
of the Gulf of Suez should not be under the 
same control as the Western has always been 
an anomaly, admitted even by the sternest 
opponents of the status of Egypt; and in the 
absence of any canal corresponding to that of 
Suez, and debouching into the Red Sea via the 
Gulf of Akabah, the most advanced champion 
of French influence in the Near East would see 
no objection to this rectified frontier. There 
is no question of competition involved. The 
proposed change is but a rational rectification 
of the present status. 

This scheme of delimitation leaves Palestine 
inset into the French protectorate of Syria, and 
it is difficult to see to whom the protectorate 
of Palestine should be properly assigned except 
to France. Italy has no expansive ambitions 
in that sector of the Mediterranean; England's 
national sphere of influence in this partition 
of the districts now occupied by alien peoples 
in the Ottoman Empire lies obviously else- 
where; and since the Jews, who settled in 
ever-increasing numbers in Palestine before 
the war, and will assuredly continue to 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 199 

settle there again, come and will come as 
refugees from the Eussian Pale, it would be 
clearly inadvisable to assign to Eussia the 
protectorate of her own refugees. The only 
other alternative would be to create an inde- 
pendent Palestine for the Jews, and the reasons 
against that are overwhelming. It would be 
merely playing into the hands of Germany to 
make such an arrangement. For the last thirty 
years Germany has watched with personal and 
special interest this immigration of Jews into 
Palestine, seeing in it not so much a Jewish but 
a German expansion. Indeed, when, in the 
spring of this year, as we have noticed, a mas- 
sacre and deportation of Jews was planned and 
begun by Jemal, Germany so far reversed her 
usual attitude towards massacres in general, 
and her expressed determination never to in- 
terfere in Turkey's internal affairs, as to lodge 
a peremptory protest, and of course got the per- 
secution instantly stopped. Her reason was 
that Pan-Turkish " ideals" (the equivalent for 
the massacre of alien people) had no sort of 
meaning in Palestine. But the Pan-Germanic 
ideals had a great deal of meaning in Palestine, 
as Dr. Davis Treitsch (Die Juden der Tilrhei) 
very clearly states. For a as a result of the 
war," he tells us, "there will be an emigration 



200 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

(KxnMWnagKmiiiiiiiiiiii bkwj ■■in i^nuoiHKEvManHEMaaannKant 

of East-European Jews on an unprecedented 
scale . . . the disposal of the East European 
Jews will be a problem for Germany (and) Ger- 
mans will be only too glad to find a way out in 
the emigration of those Jews to Turkey, a solu- 
tion extraordinarily favourable to the interests 
of all three [sic] parties concerned. There are 
grounds for talking of a German protectorate 
over the whole of Jewry.' ' 

Now this is explicit enough ; Germany clearly 
contemplated a protectorate over Palestine, and 
if the Jews who are German-speaking Jews are 
left independent, there is nothing more certain 
than that, after the war, her penetration of Pal- 
estine will instantly begin. These colonists are, 
and will be, in want of funds for the develop- 
ment and increase of their cultivated territories, 
and when we consider the names of the promi- 
nent financiers in the Central Empires, Men- 
delssohn, Hirsch, Goldsmid, Bleichroeder, 
Speyer, to name only a few, we cannot be in 
much doubt as to the quarter from which that 
financial assistance will be forthcoming, on ex- 
tremely favourable terms. It is safe to proph- 
esy that, if Palestine is given independence 
without protectorate, in three years from the 
end of the war it will be under not only a pro- 
tectorate, but a despotism as complete as ever 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 201 

ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that 
the Zionist movement will offer, even as it has 
offered in the past, a strenuous opposition to 
Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with 
an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will 
be able to resist the blandishments that Ger- 
many is certainly prepared to shower on it. For 
great as is the progress the Jewish settlers 
made in Palestine during the twenty or twenty- 
five years before the war, and strong as is the 
spirit of Zionism, the emigrants do not as yet 
number more than about 120,000, nor have they 
under crops more than ten per cent, of the cul- 
tivated land of Palestine. They are as yet but 
settlers, and their work is before them. If left 
without a protectorate they will not be with- 
out a protectorate long, but not such an one as 
the Allies desire. A protectorate there must be, 
and no reason is really of weight against that 
protectorate being French. Let that, then, ex- 
tend from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, 
and from Alexandretta to where the Hedjaz al- 
ready prospers in its self -proclaimed independ- 
ence. It will be completely severed from Tur- 
key by tracts under protection of one or other 
of the Allied Powers, any expedition through 
which would be an act of war. 

The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern 



202 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

boundary of the French protectorate: it will 
also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of 
the English protectorate, which we know as 
Mesopotamia. Just as no other Power has any 
real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as 
Syria can fall to no other than France, it seems 
equally clear that the proper sphere of English 
influence is in this plain that stretches south- 
wards from the semicircle of hills where the two 
great rivers approach each other near Diarbekr 
to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany 
very well knows, it is intimately concerned with 
our safe tenure of India, and the hold the Ger- 
mans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever 
lost, by their possession of the Bagdad Railway 
was vital to their dreams of world-conquest. 
Equally vital to England was it that Germany 
should never get it. But its importance to us as 
a land-route to India is by no means the only 
reason why an English sphere of influence is in- 
dicated here : it is the possibilities it harbours, 
which, as far as can be seen, England is the 
only Power capable of developing, that cause us 
to put in a claim for its protectorate which none 
of our Allies will dispute. 

To restore Mesopotamia to the rank it has 
held, and to the rank it still might hold among 
the productive districts of the East, there is 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 203 

U ■ " ■ ' ■ ' " ■ ' -" " ■■ "" ■ ■ » ' ■- 

. ■ 1 

needed a huge capital for outlay, and a huge 
population of workers. Even Germany, in her 
nightmare of world-dominion, from which she 
shall be soon dragged screaming-awake, never 
formulated a scheme for the restoration of 
Southern Mesopotamia to its productive pre- 
eminence, and never so much as contemplated 
it, except as an object that would be possible 
of realisation after the Empire of India had 
fallen over-ripe into her pelican mouth. There- 
in she was perfectly right — she usually is right 
in these dreams of empire in so far as they are 
empirical — for she seems dimly to have conjec- 
tured in these methodical visions, that India 
was the key to unlock Southern Mesopotamia. 
But nowhere can I find that she guessed it: I 
only guess that she guessed it. 

This problem of capital outlay and of the nec- 
essary man-power for work and restoration ap- 
plies exclusively to Southern Mesopotamia, 
which we may roughly define as the district 
stretching from Samara on the Tigris and Hit 
on the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf. North- 
ern Mesopotamia, as Dr. Rohrbach points out in 
his Bagdadbahn, needs only the guarantee of 
security of life and property to induce the 
Kurds to descend from the hills and the Bedouin 
Arabs to settle down there ; and by degrees, un- 



204 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

der a protectorate that insures them against 
massacre and confiscation of property, there 
seems no donbt that the area of cultivation will 
spread and something of the ancient prosperity 
return. The land is immensely fertile : it is only 
Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere 
else, has left desolation in the place of prosper- 
ity and death in place of life. The rainfall is 
adequate, the climate suitable to those who will 
naturally spread there: it needs only freedom 
from the murderous tyranny that has bled it 
for centuries past, to guarantee its future pros- 
perity. 

But Southern Mesopotamia is a totally differ- 
ent proposition. The land lies low between the 
rivers, and, though of unparalleled fertility, 
yields under present conditions but a precari- 
ous livelihood to its sparse population. For 
nine months of the year it is a desert, for three 
months when its rivers are in flood, a swamp. 
Once, as we all know, it was the very heart of 
civilisation, and from its arteries flowed out 
the life-blood of the world. Rainfall was scarce- 
ly existent, any more than it is existent in South- 
ern or Upper Egypt ; but in the days of Babylon 
the Great there were true rulers and men of 
wisdom over these desiccated regions, who saw 
that every drop of water in the river, that now 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 205 



pours senselessly through swamp and desert 
into the sea, was a grain of corn or a stalk 
of cotton. They dug canals, they made reser- 
voirs, and harnessed like some noble horse of 
the gods the torrents that now gallop unbridled 
through dreary deserts. The black land, the 
Sawad, was then the green land of waving corn, 
where three crops were annually harvested and 
the average yield was two hundredfold of the 
seed sown. The wheat and barley, so Herodotus 
tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the blade, 
and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in 
these details the revered Father of Lies seems 
to have spoken less than the truth, for the sta- 
tistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his 
accounts of its amazing fertility. From its 
wealth before his day had arisen the might of 
Babylon, and for centuries later, while the ca- 
nals still regulated the water supply, it re- 
mained the granary of the world. More than 
a thousand years after Herodotus there were 
over 12,500,000 acres in cultivation, and the hus- 
bandmen thereof with the dwellers in its cities 
numbered 5,000,000 men. Then came the Arab 
invasion, which was bad enough, but colossally 
worse was the invasion of the Osmanli. Truly 
"a fruitful land maketh He barren, for the 
wickedness of them that dwell therein.' ' 



206 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

But the potentiality for production of that 
great alluvial plain is not diminished ; the Turks 
could not dispose of that by massacre, as a 
means of weakening the strength of their sub- 
ject peoples. It is still there, ready to respond 
to the spell of the waters of Tigris and Euphra- 
tes, which once, when handled and controlled, 
caused it to be the Garden of the Lord. 

Not long before the present European War 
Sir William Willcocks, under whose guidance 
the great modern irrigation works at Assouan 
were constructed, was appointed adviser to the 
Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his re- 
port on the Irrigation of Mesopotamia was is- 
sued in 1911. He tells us that the whole of this 
delta of the Sawad is capable of easy levelling 
and reclamation. It would naturally be a gi- 
gantic scheme, and he takes as a basis to start 
on the question of the refertilisation of 4,000,- 
000 acres. Into the details of it we need not 
go, but his conclusions, calculated on a thor- 
oughly conservative basis, give the following 
results. He proposes to restore, of course with 
modern technical improvements, the old system 
of canals, and, allowing for interest on loans, 
estimates the total expense at £26,000,000 (or 
the cost of the war for about three days). On 
this the annual value of the crops would pay 31 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 207 

j— — f»M i — i —h,ii» iiiiii— ■ ■mil—— :^b— ^ni ■ ■ ■ " n 1 1 ■— — ■ i i 

per cent. The figures need no enlargement in 
detail and no comment. 

But now comes the difficulty : the construction 
of the irrigation works is easy, the profits are 
safe so long as the Tigris and "the ancient 
river/ ' the river Euphrates, run their course. 
But all the irrigation works in the world will 
not raise a penny for the investor or a grain 
for the miller unless there are men to sow and 
gather the crops. A million are necessary: 
where are they to come from? And the answer 
is ' l Egypt and India. ' ' 

This is precisely why the protectorate of Mes- 
opotamia and its future must be in English 
hands, why no other country can undertake it 
with hope of success. Even the ingenious Dr. 
Eohrbach, whose Bagdadbahn I have quoted be- 
fore, is forced to acknowledge that there is no 
solution to the man-power problem except by 
the " introduction of Mohammedans from other 
countries where the climatic conditions of Irak 
prevail." It is true that he starts upon the as- 
sumption that Mesopotamia will remain Turk- 
ish (under a German protectorate, as we read 
between his lines), with which we must be per- 
mitted to disagree, but his conclusion is quite 
correct. Even under German protection he 
realises that citizens of well-governed states 



208 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

— i— —— ■ — a—— — ■ a— — — — ■ — — a— — if 

will not flock by the million to put themselves un- 
der Turkish control, and he dismisses as inade- 
quate the numbers of Syrians, Arabs, Arme- 
nians and Jews who can be transported to Meso- 
potamia from inside the boundaries of the Ot- 
toman Empire. Their numbers are even more 
inadequate since the Armenian massacres per- 
mitted by Dr. Rohrbach's Fatherland, and even 
he cannot picture a million of his own country- 
men forsaking the beer-gardens for summers 
in the Sawad. He does not positively state our 
answer, that it is from India and Egypt that the 
man-power will be supplied, but, as mentioned 
before, I think he guesses it. His prophetic 
gifts are not convincing enough to himself to let 
him state the glorious future, when India and 
Egypt shall become German, but that, I feel 
sure, is his vision: "he sees it, but not now; 
he beholds it, but not nigh." 

But we can give the answer which he does not 
quite like to state, since for the English it is 
clearly more easily realisable. The native la- 
bour we can supply from Egypt and India, es- 
pecially India, will furnish a million labourers, 
and, if we wished, two millions without dif- 
ficulty. But no Power except England can fur- 
nish it. And that, I submit, is the solution of 
the problem of Mesopotamia; a solution well 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 209 

within the power of English enterprise to at- 
tain in the hands of such men as have already 
bridled the Nile, the water-horsemen of the 
world. And I cannot do better, in trying to 
convey the spirit in which this work of reclama- 
tion should be undertaken, than by quoting some 
very noble words from Sir William Willcocks 's 
report, in which he speaks of the desolation that 
has come to this garden of fruitfulness through 
wicked stewardship. 

"The last voyage I made before coming to 
this country was up the Nile from Khartoum 
to the Equatorial lakes. In this most desperate 
and forbidding region I was filled with pride 
to think I belonged to a race whose sons, even 
in this inhospitable waste of waters, were strug- 
gling in the face of a thousand discouragements 
to introduce new forest trees and new agricul- 
tural products and ameliorate in some degree 
the conditions of life of the naked and miser- 
able inhabitants. How should I have felt, if in 
traversing the deserts and swamps which to-day 
represent what was the richest and most famous 
tract in the world, I had thought that I was the 
scion of a race in whose hands God has placed, 
for hundreds of years, the destinies of this 
great country, and that my countrymen could 
give no better account of their stewardship than 



210 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

l ! 

the exhibition of two mighty rivers flowing be- 
tween deserts to waste themselves in the sea for 
nine months of the year, and desolating every- 
thing in their way for the remaining three? 
No effort that Turkey can make can be too great 
to roll away the reproach of those parched and 
weary lands, whose cry ascends to heaven/ ' 

But the harvests of Mesopotamia, when gath- 
ered in, must needs be transported, and for that 
railways are necessary. Water transport would, 
of course, carry them easily down to the Per- 
sian Gulf, but the supply will be mainly, if not 
wholly, wanted westwards, and it must be con- 
veyed to the shores of the Mediterranean. Al- 
ready, in preparation for world-conquest, Ger- 
many has proceeded far with her construction 
of the Bagdad Railway, which was intended, 
after her absorption of Turkey, to link up Ber- 
lin with her next Oriental objective, namely, 
India ; the Taurus has been tunnelled, the Eu- 
phrates bridged, and but for a hiatus of a few 
miles the line is practically complete from 
Constantinople into Northern Mesopotamia. 
But its route was chosen for German strategic 
reasons, for the linking up of Berlin with Con- 
stantinople and Bagdad. This, it may be per- 
mitted to say, does not form part of the schemes 
of the Allies : it is to snap rather than weld such 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 211 



links that they have taken the field. What we 
want in the matter of railway transport for the 
harvests of Mesopotamia, and generally for our 
Eastern communications, is not a line that 
passes through Turkish and German soil, and 
terminates at Berlin, but one which, after the 
directest possible land-route, reaches the Medi- 
terranean and terminates in suitable ports. 

The reader therefore is requested to unthink 
the present Bagdad Eailway altogether, to 
" scrap 7 ' it in his mind, as it will be probably 
scrapped on the map, since it is utterly useless 
for our purposes. For taking Aleppo as 
(roughly) the half-way house in the existent 
line, we find that the western half of it lies in 
Asia Minor, in territory which, as we shall see, 
will remain Turkish, while the eastern half of it 
makes a long detour instead of striking directly 
for Bagdad. After our experience with Turkey 
there is nothing less conceivable than that we 
should allow a single mile of our new Mesopo- 
tamia Railway to run through the territory of 
the Turks, for who knows that she might not 
(say when harvests are ripe and ready for de- 
livery), on any arbitrary pretext, close or de- 
stroy the line, even as before now she has closed 
the Dardanelles? Besides, for our purposes, 
a line that goes to Contantinople (in whoso- 



212 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

ever hands Constantinople may be after the 
war) is out of the way and altogether unsuit- 
able. Eastwards, again, from Aleppo the pres- 
ent Bagdad line is circuitous and indirect, ad- 
mirably adapted to the German purposes for 
which it was constructed, but utterly unadapted 
jfco ours. 

Let us then " scrap" the existent Bagdad 
route altogether, and consider not what the 
Germans want, but what we want, which, as has 
been already stated, is a direct land communica- 
tion with suitable Mediterranean ports. Of 
those there are three obvious ones, Alexandret- 
ta, Tripoli, and Beirut, of which Beirut is a 
long way the first in importance and potential- 
ity of increased importance. Two possible 
routes therefore would seem to suggest them- 
selves, one running from Alexandretta to Alep- 
po, and thence following pretty closely the 
course of the Euphrates till it reaches Hit, and 
from there striking directly to Bagdad. Aleppo 
is already connected with Tripoli and El Mina 
(the actual port of Tripoli), and also with Bei- 
rut by branch lines making a junction at Horns, 
and thus all those ports will be brought to- 
gether on one system. But if the reader will 
glance at the map, he will see that by far the 
most direct communication with Bagdad would 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 213 

be to run the railway direct from there to 
Horns, thus making Horns rather than Aleppo 
the central junction of the system. From Horns 
lines would run northward to Aleppo, due west 
to Tripoli, and south-west to Beirut. Either 
of those routes, in any case, would be infinitely 
preferable to the long loop which the present 
Bagdad Eailway traverses, as planned on Ger- 
man lines and for German requirements. The 
new railway will thus lie exclusively in terri- 
tory under French and English protectorate, 
and will probably be their joint enterprise and 
property. 

Prospectively then, as regards the fulfilment 
of the solemn pledge of the Allies to liberate 
subject peoples from the murderous tyranny of 
the Turks, we have discussed the future of Ar- 
menia, of Syria, of Palestine, and of Mesopota- 
mia. All those are well defined districts, and 
the demarcation of their respective protecto- 
rates should not present great difficulties. But 
there remains, before we pass on to the prob- 
lem of Constantinople, a further district less 
easily defined, largely inhabited by European 
peoples whose liberty in the future we are 
pledged to secure. This is the Mediterranean 
coastline to the south and west of Asia Minor, 
the towns of which have been so extensively 



214 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

<— — ■*■■ — - — — -^— — — — — ^ — — — — — ^ 

peopled and made prosperous by Greeks and 
Italians. Similarly among those of our Euro- 
pean Allies who are desirous and capable of 
Eastern expansion, there remains one, Italy, 
whose rights to partake in this Turkish parti- 
tion we have not yet considered. In the shifting 
kaleidoscope of national war-politics, it seems 
at the moment of writing by no means impos- 
sible that Greece, having at length got rid of a 
treacherous and unstable Reuben of a monarch, 
may redeem her pledge to Serbia, in which case, 
no doubt, she too would state the terms of her 
desired and legitimate expansion. But these 
would more reasonably be concerned with the 
redistribution of the Balkan Peninsula, which 
does not come within the scope of this book, 
and we may prophesy without fear of invoking 
the Nemesis that so closely dogs the heels of 
seers, that Italy will legitimately claim (or per- 
haps has already claimed) the protectorate of 
this valuable littoral. Certain it is that, when 
peace returns, the large population of Greeks 
and Italians once resident (and soon again to 
be) on these coasts, must be given the liberty 
and security which they will never enjoy so 
long as they remain in Turkish hands, and the 
hands that have earned the right to be protect- 
ing Power are assuredly Italian. Along the 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 215 

south coast a line including the Taurus range 
would seem to suggest a natural frontier inland 
from Adana on the east to the south-west cor- 
ner of Asia Minor, and from there a similar 
strip would pass up the coast as far as, and in- 
clusive of, Smyrna. That at least Italy has 
every right to expect, and there seems no great 
fear that among the International Councils 
there will arise a dissentient voice. The inland 
boundary on the west coast is the difficult sec- 
tion of this delimitation, and into the details of 
that it would be both rash and inexpedient to 
enter. 



ii 



We pass, then, to the second avowed object 
of the Allies, namely, the expulsion from 
Europe of the Ottoman rule, which has proved 
itself so radically alien to Western civilisation. 
This must be taken to include not only the ex- 
pulsion of the Turkish control from Thrace 
and Constantinople, but from the eastern side 
as well of the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, 
and the Dardanelles. At no future time must 
Turkey be in a position to command even par- 
tially a single yard of that momentous chan- 
nel through which alone our Allies, Eussia 



216 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

I ————— a—— — — — — — ■ m 

and Rumania, have access to the Mediterranean. 
Though this was not formally stated in the Al- 
lies ' reply to President Wilson, it is clearly part 
and parcel of the object in view, for while the 
Ottoman Empire retains the smallest control on 
either side of either of the Straits, she is so far 
able to interfere in European concerns, in 
which she must never more have a hand. The 
east shore, then, of the Straits and the Sea of 
Marmora, as well as the west, must be under 
the control of a Power, or a group of Powers, 
not alien to Western civilisation. Germany and 
her allies therefore, no less than Turkey, must 
be excluded from the guardianship of the 
Straits. 

As we have had previous occasion to note, 
this ejection of the Turkish power from Con- 
stantinople is the absolute reversal of Euro- 
pean and, in especial, of English policy for the 
last hundred years. No crime that the Ottoman 
Government could commit, no act of barbarism, 
would ever persuade us to do away with the 
anachronism of Turkey's existence in Europe; 
but at last the seismic convulsion of the war 
has knocked this policy into a heap of disjected 
ruins, and it can never be rebuilt again on the 
old lines. For among our other avowed objects 
in prosecuting the war to its victorious end, 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" SIT 

we have pledged ourselves to uphold the right 
which all peoples, whether small or great, have 
to the enjoyment of full security and free eco- 
nomic development. But while Turkey can 
close the Straits at her own arbitrary will, or at 
the bidding of a superior and malevolent Power, 
and block the passage of ships from Kussian 
and Rumanian ports into the Mediterranean, 
the economic development of both these coun- 
tries is seriously menaced. Three times within 
the last six years has she exercised that right, 
and while she holds the shores of the Straits 
she can at any moment blockade all southern 
Eussian ports. That such power should be in 
the hands of any nation is highly undesirable ; 
that it should be in the hands of a corrupt des- 
potism like Turkey, especially now that Ger- 
many, as things stand, can dictate to Turkey 
when and what she pleases, is a thing unthink- 
able by the most improvident of statesmen. Al- 
ready we have paid dearly enough for the pusil- 
lanimity of a hundred years: it is impossible 
that we should ever allow a similar bill to be 
again presented. Whatever be the guardian- 
ship of the Straits, whoever the holder of Con- 
stantinople, it will not be Turkey. 

At the beginning of the war, and indeed till 
after the revolution in Russia, it was announced 



218 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

I i i .iL iiii MM ii nn .il ■■ m ill ■ -I l m 

and stated as an axiom that on the conclusion of 
peace, Russia should be the door-keeper of what 
after all is her own lodge-gate. Subsequently, 
in the unhappy splits and disintegration of her 
Government, it was announced that she fa- 
voured peace without annexation — in other 
words, that she neither claimed nor desired the 
guardianship of Constantinople. But I think 
we should be utterly wrong if we regarded that 
as an expression of the will of the Russian peo- 
ple : it is far more probable that it was the ex- 
pression of the will of Germany, directly in- 
spired by German influence with a view to con- 
cluding a separate peace with Russia. As we 
have seen, it had its due effect in Turkey, and 
Talaat Bey gave vent to pious ejaculations of 
thanksgiving, that now all cause of quarrel with 
Russia was removed, and Turkey and she could 
be friends. It is possible that when out of the 
confused cries there again rises from Russia 
the clear call of the people's voice, we shall 
find her wishing to set in order her own house 
before she projects herself on new missions, 
but, as far as the manifesto of " peace without 
territorial annexation" goes, we shall be wise 
to regard it for the present with the profound- 
est suspicion. It sounds far more like the tones 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDE D" 219 

of the Central European wolf than those of Lit- 
tle Red Riding Hood's proper grandmother. 

But be Russia's decision what it may, the 
Turk will hold sway no longer in Thrace or 
Constantinople, or on the shores of the Straits 
of the Sea of Marmora. There is, of course, no 
question of deporting the whole of the Turkish 
population that lives in those regions, nor would 
it be desirable, even if it were possible, to real- 
ise Gladstone's robust vision of seeing every 
Turk, "bag and baggage," clear out from the 
provinces they have desolated and profaned. 
But if not under Russia, then under the joint 
control of certain of the Allied Powers there 
will be a complete reconstruction of the admin- 
istration of those districts. The headquarters 
of the protectorate will doubtless be at Con- 
stantinople, which will be reorganised some- 
what on the lines of the Treaty Port of Shang- 
hai, and will be open to the ships of all nations. 
The security of the town must be assured by a 
military garrison either of mixed troops of the 
controlling nations, or possibly by a rotation 
of troops drawn from the armies of each in 
turn. More important even than this will be 
the adequate control of the Straits by sea. A 
naval base must be formed, which by the gospel 
of the freedom of the seas (but not according 



220 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 



to St. Goeben and the submarine disciples) will 
constitute a patrolling police force of the wa- 
ters. V^hether the system of fortifications and 
defences that lately rendered the Dardanelles 
impregnable shall be retained or not is a ques- 
tion demanding the most careful consideration. 
Some will hold that they should be maintained 
in order to insure that none but the guarantors 
of the freedom of the Straits shall ever take 
possession of them: others that they shall be 
utterly dismantled and destroyed, so that the 
closing of the Straits shall be an impossibility. 
The matter really turns on the question as to 
the extent to which the Allies will have the pru- 
dence to cut Germany's claws when the war is 
over. It is eminently to be hoped that they 
will be cut so short that never again will they be 
able to show those chiselled talons beyond her 
velvet — that sense, in fact, will allow sentiment 
no word to say. Unfortunately, there are a 
great many people the basis of whose character 
consists of a washy confidence in the good in- 
tentions of everybody. Most mistaken!/ they 
call it Christianity. 

Here, then, has been outlined the effect of the 
Allies' declared aims. Such territories as Tur- 
key holds in Europe, such control as she pos- 
sesses over the free passage of the Straits must 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 221 



pass from her, and the alien peoples, who for 
centuries have fainted and bled underneath her 
infamous yoke, must be led out of the land of 
bondage. As we have seen throughout preced- 
ing chapters, it was the fixed policy of the Otto- 
man Government to rid itself of their presence, 
and already it has gone far in its murderous 
mission. Indeed the avowed aims of the Allies, 
when accomplished, will do that work for her, 
for the Allies are determined to remove those 
peoples from Turkey. The difference of execu- 
tion, however, consists in this, that they will not 
remove Arabs and Greeks and Italians and 
Jews, as Turkey has already done with the Ar- 
menians by the simple process of massacres, but 
by a process no less simple, namely, of taking 
out of the territories of the Ottoman Empire 
the districts where such peoples dwell. The 
Allies will accomplish, in fact, for the Turks 
that policy of Ottomanisation which was the aim 
of Abdul Hamid, and has been the aim 
of his more murderous successors. Turkey 
shall henceforth be for the Turks : she shall no 
more be in " danger' ' from the defenceless na- 
tions, who at present exist within her borders. 
The Sultan of Turkey, in some year of grace 
now not far distant, will find that his Otto- 
manisation has been done for him, and, though 



%%% CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

i — — ————— — — 

his realm is curtailed, he will have his rest 
broken no more by the thought of Arab risings, 
nor will he have to devise measures that will 
solve the Arab question. Except for a strip 
along the west and south coast, all Asia Minor 
and Anatolia will be his from the Black Sea to 
the Mediterranean, but Syria, Armenia, the 
coast of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Mesopo- 
tamia shall have passed from him. It is no dis- 
memberment of an Empire that the Allies con- 
template, for they cannot dismember limbs that 
never belonged to the real trunk. It was a des- 
potic military control that the Osmanlis had 
established; they always regarded their subject 
peoples as aliens, whom they did not scruple to 
destroy if they exhibited symptoms of progress 
and civilisation. Henceforth, the Turkish Gov- 
ernment shall govern Turks, and Turks alone. 
That for many years has been its aim, and, by 
the disastrous dispensation of fate, it has been 
largely able to realise its purpose. Now, though 
by different methods, the Allies will see thor- 
ough accomplishment of it. There will be no 
question, of course, of turning out or of deport- 
ing Turks who live in Syria, in Armenia, in Con- 
stantinople, for the ways of the Allies are not 
those of Talaat and Enver and Jemal the Great. 
Where to-day Turks dwell, there shall they con- 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 223 

tinue to dwell, but they must dwell there in 
peace in equal liberties and rights with the 
once-subject peoples whom the Allies shall have 
delivered. If they do not like that they can 
migrate, not by forced marches and under the 
guardianship of murderous Kurds, but in pro- 
tection and security, to the lands where they 
can still enjoy the beneficent sway of their own 
governors, and be Ottomanised to the top of 
their bent. But Syrians and Armenians and 
Greeks and Jews will be Ottomanised no longer. 
The Turk was always a fighter, disciplined 
and courageous, and he has never lost that vir- 
tue of valour. But he has been a fighter be- 
cause he has always lived under a military des- 
potism which demanded his services, and it is 
much to be doubted whether his qualities in this 
regard will for the future be exercised as they 
have been in the past. For the Turkish armies, 
in so far as they have consisted of Turks, have 
been chiefly, if not wholly, recruited from the 
peasantry of Anatolia, who, when not sum- 
moned to their country's colours, or ordered to 
maltreat and massacre, are quiet, rather indo- 
lent folk, content to plough their lands and reap 
an exiguous but sufficient harvest. And for 
their lords and governors, who, until Prussia 
assumed command of the Turkish armies, there 



%m CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

will no longer be either the possibility of fur- 
ther conquests as in the old Osmanli days, or, 
in less progressive times, the necessity for se- 
curing Ottoman supremacy over the huge ill- 
knit lands which it governed. But now, instead 
of having alien and defenceless tribes within 
their borders, tribes forbidden to bear arms and 
chafing at the Turkish yoke, they will see free 
peoples under the protectorates of Powers that 
are capable of self-defence and, if necessary, of 
inflicting punishment. Russia, France, Eng- 
land, Italy, all allied nations, will be established 
in close proximity to the Turkish frontiers, and 
the New Turkey will be as powerless for aggres- 
sion as she will be for defence, should she pro- 
voke attack. But within their borders there 
may the Osmanlis dwell secure and undis- 
turbed, so long as they conform to the habits of 
civilised people with regard to their neighbours, 
and it is a question whether, now that the mili- 
tary despotism which has always misguided the 
fortunes of this people, has no possible fields 
for conquest, and no need of securing security, 
the nation will not settle down into the quiet 
existence of small neutral countries. Perhaps 
the last chapter of its savage and blood-stained 
history is already almost finished, and in years 



"THY KINGDOM IS DIVIDED" 225 



to come some little light of progress and of civil- 
isation may be kindled in the abode where the 
household gods for centuries have been cruelty 
and hate. 



CHAPTER VII 

(The Grip of the Octopus 

It will not be sufficient for the fulfilment of the 
Allies' aims as regards Turkey to free from 
her barbarous control the subject peoples dwell- 
ing within her borders, for Turkey herself has 
|fco be delivered from a domination not less bar- 
baric than her own, which, if allowed to con- 
tinue, would soon again be a menace to the 
peace of the world. We have seen in a previous 
chapter how deeply set in her are Germany's 
nippers, how closely the octopus-embrace en- 
velops her, and we now have to consider how 
those tentacles must be unloosed from their 
grip, and what will be the condition of the vic- 
tim, already bled white, when that has been 
done. In the beginning, as we have seen, Ger- 
many obtained her hold by professing a touch- 
ingly beautiful and philanthropic desire to help 
Turkey to realise her national ideals, and her 
Pecksniffs, Tekin Alp and Herr Ernst Marre, 
were bidden to write parallel histories, the one 

226 



THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS <W 

describing the aims of the Nationalist party, 
the other the benevolent interest which Ger- 
many took in them. Occasionally Herr Ernst 
Marre could not but remember that he was a 
German, and permitted us to see the claws of 
the cat, without quite letting it out of the bag, 
but then he pulled the strings tight again, and 
only loud comfortable purrings could be heard, 
the Prussian musings over the "liberation" of 
Turkey which she was helping to accomplish. 
But nowadays, so it seems to me, the strings 
have been loosened, and the claws and teeth are 
clearly visible. It is not so long since Dr. 
Schnee, Governor of German East Africa, sent 
a very illuminating document to Berlin from 
which I extract the following: — 

"Do you consider it possible to make a regu- 
lation prohibiting Islam altogether? The en- 
couragement of pig-breeding among natives is 
recommended by experts as an effective means 
of stopping the spread of Islam. . . ." 

That seems clear enough, and I can imagine 
Talaat Bey, with his sword of honour in his 
hand, exclaiming with the Oysters in Alice in 
Wonderland: — 



228 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

" After such kindness that would be 
A dismal thing to do." 

But I am afraid that Germany is contemplat- 
ing (as indeed she has always done) a quantity 
of dismal things to do, and is now, like the Wal- 
rus and the Carpenter, beginning to let them 
appear. She has taken the Turkish oysters out 
for a nice long walk, and when the war is over 
she proposes to sit down and eat them. And 
did she not also interfere in the affair of Jew- 
ish massacres and declare that "Pan-Turkish 
ideals have no sort of meaning in Palestine"? 
That must have been almost an unfriendly act 
from Turkey's point of view, for it cannot be 
stated too clearly that part of the price which 
Germany paid for Turkey's entry on her side 
into the war, was the liberty, as far as Germany 
was concerned, of managing her internal af- 
fairs, massacres and the rest, as best suited the 
damnable doctrines of Ottomanisation. The 
other Powers could not interfere, for they 
failed to force the Dardanelles, and Germany 
promised not to. That promise, of course, was 
binding on Germany for just so long as it suited 
her to keep it, and it suited her to keep it, on 
the whole, during the Armenian massacres. 
And in that matter her refusal to interfere is, 



THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS 229 

among all her crimes, the very flower and 
felicity of her vileness. 

Signs are not wanting that Turkey is begin- 
ning to realise the position in which she has 
placed herself, namely, that of a bankrupt de- 
pendant at the mercy of a nation to whom that 
quality is a mere derision. Lately a quantity 
of small incidents have occurred, such as dis- 
putes over the ownership of properties financed 
by Germany and the really melodramatic de- 
preciation in the German coinage, which unmis- 
takably show the swift ebb of Turkey's mis- 
placed confidence. More significant perhaps 
than any is a transaction that took place in May 
1917, when Talaat Bey and Enver Pasha took 
the whole of their private fortunes out of the 
Deutsche Bank in Constantinople, and invested 
them in two Swiss banks, namely, the Banque 
Nationale de Suisse, and the Banque Federale : 
they drew out also the whole funds of the Com- 
mittee of Union and Progress, and similarly 
transferred them. This operation was not ef- 
fected without loss, for in return for the Turk- 
ish £1 they received only thirteen francs. But 
it is significant that they preferred to lose over 
fifty per cent, of their capital, and have the 
moiety secure in Switzerland to leaving it in 



230 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

i— — — ^ — ——— »^^— — 

Constantinople. 1 It is certain therefore that at 
both ends of the scale a distrust of German 
management has begun. A starving population 
has wrecked trains loaded with foodstuffs going 
to Germany, and at the other end the men with 
the swords of honour and dishonour deem it 
wise to put their money out of reach of the great 
Prussian cat. That the Germans themselves 
are not quite at their ease concerning the se- 
curity of their hold may also be conjectured, for 
they are, as far as possible, removing Turkish 
troops from Constantinople, and replacing them 
with their own regiments. An instance of this 
occurred in June 1917, when, owing to the dis- 
content in the capital, it was found necessary 
to guard bridges, residences of Ministers, and 
Government offices. But instead of recalling 
Turkish troops from Galicia to do this, they 
kept them there in the manner of hostages, 
mixed up in German regiments, and sent picked 
bodies of German troops to Constantinople. 
Fresh corps of secret police have also been 
formed to suppress popular manifestations. 
They are allowed to ' ' remove ' ' suspects by any 

1 Similarly, in October of this year, a new Turkish law was 
passed, prohibiting the acquisition of Turkish land by foreign 
settlers. This is aimed point-blank at Germany, and has nat- 
urally annoyed Berlin very much. 



THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS 231 

means they choose, quite in the old style of bag 
and Bosporus, but the organisation of them is 
German. And well may the German Govern- 
ment distrust those signs of popular discontent 
in a starving population: already the people 
have awoke to the fact that the German paper 
money does not represent its face-value, and, 
despite assurances to the contrary, it is at a 
discount scarcely credible. Three German £1 
notes are held even in Constantinople to be the 
equivalent of a gold £1, while in the provinces 
upwards of five are asked for, and given, in 
exchange for one gold pound. It is in vain that 
German manifestoes are put forth declaring 
that all Government offices will take the notes 
as an equivalent for gold, for what the people 
want is not a traffic with Government offices, but 
the cash to buy food. Even more serious is the 
fact that Austrian and Hungarian directors of 
banks will no longer accept these scraps of 
paper. In vain, too, is it that the hungry folk 
see the walls of the " House of Friendship' ' 
rise higher and higher in Constantinople, for 
every day they see with starving eyes the trains 
loaded with sugar from Konia, and the harvests 
raised in Anatolia with German artificial man- 
ures guarded by German troops and rolling 
westwards to Berlin. According to present es- 



232 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

mBm ^ HnHBMB MHMMM MHB ■ Mi SB ~H1H MM MM M MB MB Ml MMMMB ■ 

timates tlie harvest this year is so vastly more 
abundant than that of previous years, that no 
comparison, as the Minister of Agriculture tells 
his gratified Government, is possible. But the 
poorer classes get no more than the leavings of 
it when the armies, which include the German 
army, have had their wants supplied. The gov- 
erning classes, whom it is necessary to feed, are 
not yet suffering, for the Germans grant them 
enough, issuing rations to such families as are 
proved adherents of the German-Turkish com- 
bination, and until the pinch of want attacks 
them we should be foolishly optimistic if we 
thought that a starving peasantry would cause 
the collapse or the defection of Germany's new- 
est and most valuable colony. There is enough 
discontent to make Germany uneasy, but that 
is all. 1 Long ago she proved the efficiency of 
her control, and the successful pulling of her 
puppet-strings, and no instance of that is more 
complete than the brief story of Yakub Jemil 
and the extinction of him and his party, which, 
though it happened a full year ago, has only 
lately been completely transmitted. Yakub 
Jemil was an influential commander of a fron- 
tier guard near the Black Sea coast. In July 

1 The army rations have lately been reduced, each Turkish 
soldier receiving daily an oke of bread and a dried mackerel. 



THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS 233 

1916 lie went to Constantinople, accompanied 
by his staff (which included the informant from 
whom this account is derived), and, being cor- 
dially received by Enver and Talaat, discussed 
the situation with them. He pointed out the 
demoralising effect of the Armenian massacres, 
and the danger of Jemal the Great's attitude 
towards the Arabs in Syria, realising, and seek- 
ing to make them realise, the stupendous folly 
of making enemies of the subject peoples, and 
urging the re-establishment of cordial relations 
between the Turks and them. That, consider- 
ing that Enver and Talaat were responsible 
(under the Germans) for the Armenian mas- 
sacres, was a brave outspeaking. He went on 
to say that Turkey was at war not on behalf of 
herself, but on behalf of Germany, and that it 
would be wise of the Government to consider 
the possibility of a separate peace with the 
Powers of the Entente. He was heard with 
interest, and took his leave. 

He remained in Constantinople, and his views 
obtained him many adherents, not only among 
Turkish officers whose sympathies were already 
alienated from Germany, but among members 
of the Committee of Union and Progress. But 
before long his adherents began to disappear, 
and he asked for another interview with Talaat. 



234 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

— — i^ — ■— — — — — — i^— ■■ ^^^ 

He was received, as the informant states, "with 
open arms," for Talaat seized and held him, 
called for the guard, and he was searched, and 
on him were found certain documents which 
proved him to hold the views he had already 
expressed. That now, was enough. He was 
" interrogated' ' for two days (interrogation is 
otherwise called torture), and was then hanged. 
Subsequently 111 officers and men in the army 
also disappeared. Some were marched into the 
Khiat Khana Valley, opposite Pera, and were 
stabbed: others were sent under escort to the 
provinces and murdered. No courts-martial of 
any kind were held. 

And should anybody doubt the efficiency of 
German control in Turkey, and be disposed to 
be optimistic about the imminence of Turkey's 
detachment, he might do well to ponder that 
story. 

Meantime the efficacy of our naval blockade 
is largely discounted by Germany's new source 
of supply. Possibly in the ensuing winter of 
1917-18 conditions may get unbearable, but if 
the Turkish Government only two years ago 
massacred more than a million of its subjects, 
it would be absurd to expect that the starving 
of a million more would produce much effect on 



THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS 



235 



the Ministers of the Turkish God of Love. 1 The 
people are, of course, told, with suitable statis- 
tics, how famine is decimating England and 
France, and how the total starvation of those 
unfortunate countries is imminent. Indeed, of 
all the signs of want of confidence in their Ger- 
man overlords, by far the most promising are 
the facts that Talaat and Enver have sent their 
money out of the country, and that Jemal the 
Great has a swelled head. On these facts there 
is a certain justifiable optimism to be based. 
It will do no good to consider them academi- 
cally in London; but are there not practical 
channels to reach the instincts of the Turkish 
triumvirate that might be navigated? 

We need not trouble ourselves with consider- 
ing what the Allies will have to do with the 
Turkish army when once the end of the war 
comes, for the collapse of the military party in 
Turkey, which owes its whole vitality to Ger- 
many, will be perfect and complete. But the 



1 The following list of prices in Constantinople is of inter- 



est: 





July 1914. 


July 1917. 


Eice, per lb. 


. . 2%d. 


3s. 4d. 


Milk, per quart 


5d. 


2s. 


Flour, per lb. 


3d. 


2s. 6d. 


Petroleum, per lb. . 


Id. 


4s. 6d. 


Pair of boots 


£1 


£8. 



236 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

economical future of Turkey is not so plain : at 
the present moment its bankruptcy is total. 
Early in the war Germany drained it of such 
bullion as it had, and has since then advanced 
it about £150,000,000, which, as far as I can 
trace, is entirely in German paper, and must be 
redeemed in gold at some period (chiefly two 
years) after the end of the war. That is won- 
derful finance, and one marvels that Turkey 
could have been so far blinded as to accept it. 
But I expect that the swallowing of the first 
loan was sweetened by a spoonful of jam of 
this kind. Germany pointed out that, though 
England was quite certainly going to lose the 
war, she had issued an immense paper coinage 
which had all the purchasing power of gold. 
Germany, on the other hand, with her dear Ally 
to help her, was just as certainly going to win 
the war. How, then, could there be the slight- 
est risk of the German paper money depreciat- 
ing a single piastre in value? That sounded 
very good sense to Turkey, who was equally 
convinced that she would be on the victorious 
side (else she would not have joined it), and 
down went the loan with a pleasant sensation of 
sweetness. A second loan was easily induced 
by the failure of the Dardanelles expedition, 
and about then the "ignorant" Turkish peasant 



THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS 237 

began to wonder whether the paper was quite 
as valuable as gold, and to prefer gold or even 
the ordinary silver piastre to its German equiv- 
alent. To counteract that, as we have seen, a 
law was passed making it criminal to hoard 
gold, and, to complete the ruin, the silver piastre 
was called in, and a nickel token was substituted. 
. . . We can but bow our heads in reverence of 
the thoroughness of German swindling. 

Now Turkey is completely bankrupt, and we 
must ask ourselves why Germany ever bar- 
gained for the repayment in gold, after the war, 
of the millions she had lent the Turks in paper, 
if she knew that Turkey could never repay her. 
True, the loans had only cost her the paper the 
notes were printed on, so that in no case could 
she prove a loser, but how could she be a gainer? 
The answer to that question shouts at us from 
every acre of Turkish soil. The immense un- 
developed riches of Turkey supply the answer. 
Some indeed are already being developed, and 
the labour and most of the materials have been 
paid for by the German paper notes. There are 
the irrigation works at Adana, there is the beet- 
sugar industry at Konia, the irrigation works 
in the Makischelin Valley, the mineral conces- 
sions of the Bagdad Eailway, the Haidar Pasha 
Harbour concessions, the afforestation scheme 



238 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

near Constantinople, the cotton industry in An- 
atolia — there is no end to them. Turkey may 
not be able to pay in cash, but over all these 
concessions already working, and over a hun- 
dred more, of which the concessions have been 
granted, Germany has a complete hold, and her 
victim will pay in minerals and cotton and 
sugar and corn. She will pay over and over 
and over again, as none who have the smallest 
knowledge of Kultur-finance can possibly doubt. 
She is bled white already, and for the rest of 
time bloodless and white will she remain. Only 
one event can possibly avert her fate, and that 
is the victory of the Allies. 

We have been so bold as to assume that this 
is not an impossible contingency, and on that 
assumption there is a brighter future for Tur- 
key than the Prussian domination could ever 
bring her. Bankrupt she is, but, as Germany 
saw, she is rich in possibilities even with regard 
to the restricted territory to which she will 
surely find herself limited, and it is a pleasant 
chance for her that Germany has already been 
so busy in developing the resources of Anatolia. 
For Germany may safely bet her last piece of 
paper money that she will not lay a finger on 
them. 

The Turkey of the future is to be for the 



THE GRIP OF THE OCTOPUS 239 

* ■ — ■■■■ ■ ■ . ., ... - I. ■ — " 

Turks; not for the persecuted Armenians, nor 
for the Arabs, nor for the Greeks, and assuredly 
it is not to be for the Prussians. While the war 
lasts, Germany may draw supplies from the 
fields her artificial manures have enriched, and 
from the acres that her paper money has 
planted, but after that no more. Her Ottoman- 
ising work will be over. Such development 
(and it is far from negligible) as she has done 
in Syria will be continued under French protec- 
tion for the Arabs, such as she has done in 
Mesopotamia under English protection, and 
such as she has done in Anatolia will be con- 
tinued by the Turks to drag them out of the 
utter insolvency that she has brought them to. 
Never before has a country so justly and so 
richly deserved the repudiation of a debt in- 
curred by the confidence trick. Not a civilised 
Government in the world would dream of en- 
forcing payment, any more than a magistrate 
would enforce a payment to some thimble-rigger 
returning from a race-meeting. 

The roar of battle still renders inaudible all 
voices save its own, but already the dusk begins 
to gather over the halls where sit the War-lord 
and those who, for the realisation of their mon- 
strous dreams, loosed hell upon the world, and 



240 CRESCENT AND IRON CROSS 

in the growing dusk there begin to steal upon 
the wall the letters of pale flame that to them 
portend the doom, and to us give promise of 
dawn. Faintly they can see the legend Mene, 
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. . . . 



THE END 



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